Confusing parts of VisibleTimeRange API

[jleibs]

The TimeBoundary requires passing in a TimeInt.

• In our set_time_seconds APIs, we allow floating point seconds values.
• At the moment if you mistakenly pass a float in seconds, it's converted to an int implicitly (and incorrectly)
• Proposal: make this require a rwarg: seq, seconds, or nanos

API doesn't make it clear you can't specify a time range more than one

• Because the input takes the form of a list, it's not clear that you can't do:

    time_ranges=[
        rrb.VisibleTimeRange(
            "time",
            start=rrb.TimeRangeBoundary.absolute(0),
            end=rrb.TimeRangeBoundary.absolute(10),
        ),
        rrb.VisibleTimeRange(
            "time",
            start=rrb.TimeRangeBoundary.absolute(20),
            end=rrb.TimeRangeBoundary.absolute(30),
        ),
    ]

as a user I might expect this to give me the union of the two ranges. Instead I believe it's simply first-value-wins for the timeline key.

• At a minimum we should probably warn on duplicate values here.

[Wumpf]

nothing to add to the first point and I think it's quite important to improve this as suggested.

API doesn't make it clear you can't specify a time range more than one

it is documented that it's a first value wins situation /// If a timeline is listed twice, the first entry will be used..
We could look into making this also take a dictionary but that gets tricky to map out to the existing data structures. I'm not convinced yet this is that much of a problem to justify a lot more time spent on it.

[jleibs]

it is documented that it's a first value wins situation

Not in the doc visible in the editor:

This other thing I was thinking we could do would just be scan them and print a warning.