Suggestion: Here is a nice subtle way to deprecate data structures in future

[rks125]

In the future, to avoid "public outcry" from those that have enjoyed the benefits of your labor, I have two suggestions for avoiding breaking all dependencies that people have on your formats:

1. For a major (large outbreak) country, such as the US, enter a new county or region (new row in the table) with a name like "This file deprecated, please see GitHub" and a large number of confirmed cases so that it makes people's reports look funny (like 9,999,999. This will cause people's reports to look funny and go look at their data. Simultaneously, this will allow people to filter out that new record until they move to your new data structure. It's a friendly way to transition as not everyone is monitoring github for comments; but people do seem to refresh their data sets daily. Do this for a few days to give a heads up to people.

2. Another alternative is to maintain different versions of the files. If you are using scripts to generate the current format, this is simply maintaining that with the same names and then introduce new files with new formats. The data structures in any of the files I have seen thus far are simple and this doesn't seem like a major effort.

And regarding your data format before the currently deprecated one, you used to put counties, states, countries all together for all data... this was perfect. I think you struggled to figure out how to account for "Undesignated" counties for states that had counties. I would have just created a county named "Undesignated" for the difference between "State" and the total of the counties. This would have prevented the need to move to the last format and back to this new format. It seems like you are trying to figure out how to get back to where you were to get the granularity of the counties.

The good news here is that your efforts are appreciated, as you can tell because of the outcry when you change the data. If you made these changes and nobody complained, then you would be wasting your time posting these daily changes. So take these complaints as appreciation.

[jankyupeblik]

a large number of confirmed cases so that it makes people's reports look funny (like 9,999,999.

Hell no. Try 0. A 0 looks funny during an outbreak, and a 9,999,999 will make people crazier than they already are.

With you in general other than that, though.

[rks125]

The idea is to make something stand out but you can still filter out while you transition to the new structure. Putting a zero in there would not change any totals and therefore you would not notice the record. I may be overlooking what you are suggesting and how it would stand out, but if it results in drawing the attention of the dependent applications but simultaneously allows people to filter out the results while they work on implementing the new data structure, then that works too. :)