More information on when interaction with external service fails + offline mode?

[yarikoptic]

$> vim .tributors  # provided a full name for a person

and expected update to just update "name", but it seems did go for a full "interaction":

$> tributors update zenodo
INFO:zenodo:Updating .zenodo.json
Response 403: rate limit exceeded, cannot retrieve contributors.

1. would be nice to report which service failed... if we even "hard code" some information about most common gotchas and inform user here ("rate limit on communication with X exceeded. There should be only up to Y interactions. To increase the limit you need to obtain an API key Z from A, or just wait B and rerun again.
2. update should get an option to perform only offline updates (like here)

[vsoch]

That is always the GitHub API, and there is a note about it in the docs but we could add a note that it's the GitHub api in the error message.

[yarikoptic]

Good docs are great, but IMHO informative --help and error messages are a better guidance. Take git as an example (although indeed it's man pages are now not that easy to digest due to age/richness of functionality - it is then when additional distilled docs/blogs/demos come handy).

[vsoch]

Two fixes here:

• the error message is updated to alert about the GitHub API.
• Zenodo does not require a doi for generation, it just won't add as much metadata
• there can't really be support for offline because we always use the GitHub contributors as a source of truth, and that requires the API. If we fallback to the .tributors file then that would mean cross-pollination between contributor files, which we don't necessarily want.

The feature you will want for this "offline" mode is to update explicitly from one to another, and .tributors can be a source for the update. Closing here in favor of this issue #32