incr/decr parameter "by" should be a long, not an int about spymemcached HOT 9 CLOSED

There was a lot of discussion about this in the past.  We actually had a lot of 
discussion in the protocol definition about making it an *unsigned* 64-bit 
integer on the wire.  I still think that was a pretty awful mistake, but oh 
well.

In practice, I don't think people are likely to be bumping counters up by more 
than 2 billion at a go, but I won't argue that it's wrong.  It can't go in in a 
minor version, though, because it'll change the method signature.

Thank you. I use one bit-shifted counter to store 3 different values so that's 
why I need to increment by a large values.

One option that might make it eligible for minor version release is if you 
added different methods for incr/decr by a long and the previous int version 
delegated to them.

Yeah, that I'd rather not do.  There are already way too many methods in there. 
 I've been hoping to get rid of the bulk of them for years.  :(

Your case makes sense, though.  I've not heard of anyone doing that before.

I have to disagree with dsallings on this.  Just changing it from int to long 
will suddenly break a lot of code.  I agree that there are too many methods in 
there, but shipping a library update that breaks existing binaries is just 
wrong, especially when it can be prevented.

As annoying as it might be, perhaps we need to update the interface, the class 
and include an abstract to implement this?

Sorry to be late to the discussion.

I was thinking about having it come in as a new version.  I don't want to just 
keep broadening the surface area.  The number of methods has already nearly 
tripled from when I tried to start bringing it down.  :/

If it is decided to do both, we should at least deprecate some of the stuff we 
don't want people using so we *can* get rid of it in the future.

I agree that we should deprecate and remove in the future.  I just don't want 
people to be afraid to update to newer versions, which is what we may cause if 
we randomly take away functions.  People don't always get to rebuild from 
source.  Ops people sometimes need to update something to address a bug, 
without cracking open a project.

If this were rarely used functionality, I'd say we can break it and release 
note it, but incr is probably super common.

Fixed in 2.8 developer preview 3