On May 17, 2019, at 4:27 PM, Brooke Storm <bstorm@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Similar to the earlier removal of text fields from the wiki replicas for comment storage refactors in Mediawiki, we are going to remove “user text” columns from the views that are deprecated in the Mediawiki schema to prepare for when they will actually be removed upstream.  The column drops are tracked and explained here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T223406.  The tables with names such as <tablename>_compat will not see a difference in structure.  The change is scheduled for Monday, May 27th.

The fields that are dropping from the views are:

• revision: rev_user and rev_user_text.
• archive: ar_user and ar_user_text.
• ipblocks: ipb_by and ipb_by_text.
• image: img_user and img_user_text.
• oldimage: oi_user and oi_user_text.
• filearchive: fa_user and fa_user_text.
• recentchanges: rc_user and rc_user_text.
• logging: log_user and log_user_text.

Ideally, tools that connect to the replicas should gather the information from the appropriate entries in the actor table instead, again, this is similar to the change for the comment table. The data is already there for you to start using.  The alternative is to try using the related <tablename>_compat table, which won’t be changing in a user-visible way at this time.

Brooke Storm

Operations Engineer

Wikimedia Cloud Services

bstorm@wikimedia.org

IRC: bstorm_