ibnesayeed
commented
8 years ago Well, the problem is that we don't have real semantics defined to put this information in the payload. In case of HTTP response, this extra data is sent in the headers, separate from the payload. This can be helpful if the client does not want to download the payload from the aggregator server. However, in case of one-off command, the data will be available anyway. Additionally, there is no real place where we can provide this extra piece of information when only STDERR and STDOUT are the only available output channels. Counting lines and subtracting a fixed number should work reliably though. Additionally, this information is logged when the logging is enabled.
As a web-service, the number of mementos is returned as an HTTP header but if just running the script as a one-off with a single URI, a TimeMap is returned leaving the client to count the mementos. As we have discussed before, this can be problematic (for instance, counting the instances of the "memento" literal is unreliable"). This would be particularly useful when the Link format is expected as the response.