On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 11:15 PM, Brad Jorsch bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
It is documented that 'uccontinue' may be used for continuation, because all possible parameters to a module are documented. But it is not documented anywhere that 'ucstart' might be returned inside the query-continue node instead, even though this could currently be the case (and note this is another candidate for bug 24782 fixing).
Exactly - putting ucstart into query-continue was already a breaking change whenever it was done, because the documentation states that uccontinue is the parameter that is used for continues.
To fix the bug 24782, what is happening is essentially that the API is going back to what it should have been doing all along, using e.g. "uccontinue" for the continue parameter instead of "ucstart".
In general, if it is possible to use the existing, documented parameter name, that will cause fewer problems than renaming it. In particular, unless there is a maximum field length to worry about, it seems like it should always be possible to honor the original continuation parameter name for each module. That gives backwards compatibility as long as the client treats the value as opaque data.
The documentation that the client should pass the entire query-continue section is very recent [1] and was not at all part of the original document API spec when it was introduced circa 2007.
- Carl
1: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=API:Query&diff=603120&old...