On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Brad Jorsch bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
That statement does not appear to be correct. ucstart was used in the very first revision of the module.[1] uccontinue wasn't added until almost two years later.[2]
Thank you for noticing that. I was thinking of cmstart, which was added as a continuation parameter [1] when cmcontinue had already been established. As you can see, the overall API code is somewhat messy in terms of the parameter names: cmcontinue but rcstart, etc.
Have you a link to the original spec about the query-continue section?
The continuation system dates back to query.php, which would return a "next" parameter when a query needed to be continued; the value of that parameter was then used to set a specific continuation "from" parameter in order to get the next set of data. In api.php, the values of the "next" parameters were moved to the query-continue section of the response, and the "from" parameters were renamed.
I think we agree that the original system was not so well documented. Of course it is a volunteer project - Yuri asked for help with the documentation in 2007, and I was among the people who didn't spend much time helping with that. So the documentation should not be taken as a reflection on Yuri's work at the time to implement things.
But if there was never any documentation until 2012 that the entire query-continue section should be passed along (I have been unable to find it), there's no reason to think the existing clients would already be doing it. The only consequence of this is that changes to the names of the continuation parameters for the "old" system should be minimized, and the "new" system should be more clearly documented.
- Carl
1: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/33256