Wrong response type: string should be int about deps.dev

[sarnesjo]

Thanks for reporting this. It is indeed a bug in the generated documentation for our the API.

A bit of technical detail: Our API can be accessed via gRPC or as JSON-over-HTTP, with the latter being implemented in terms of the former. The canonical service definition can be found in api.proto, which uses int64 for these fields, which is encoded as string in JSON to avoid precision loss when used from JavaScript, whose number type only supports integers up to 2^53-1.

As a short-term fix, we have updated our documentation generator and regenerated the documentation to correctly describe these fields as string. In a future version of the API, we will change their type to int32/number, but for now, we want to avoid breaking existing clients.

[edoardottt]

Thank you so much for the answer @sarnesjo.

So I have to assume ALL number types in that docs mean string (e.g. edges[].fromNode: number in GetDependencies) or the ones having type uint32 are okay?