Request for Feedback on Governance: list_neurons pagination API

[dfxjesse]

Hi @jasonzhu Thanks for looking at it. Mostly because of this:

@free

Leaving aside the fact that the IC’s messaging layer guarantees response delivery, what you describe is something that virtually every single distributed system has to deal with: there is no such thing as guaranteed message delivery unless you’re willing to wait arbitrarily long. And a system that takes arbitrarily long to do even the simplest thing is not a very useful system. Just how likely would you be to use this forum if every 10th interaction took a few hours?

Also, this is exactly how ingress messages work: you send an ingress message; it is executed and the response certified; you have exactly 5 minutes to query for its status. If your internet connection goes down for 5+ minutes, you will never find out what the response was. If your canister does not provide an alternative way of learning the outcome, then you have not built a very useful application.

In the event something goes wrong, if I relied solely on the response from spawn neuron, I would have no way of finding whose spawned neuron that is - only by creating known subaccounts can it reliably find the users spawned neuron from list_neurons - and even if I just hoped all the calls were successful I would still need to do this as a backup measure.