Hi folks,

a new stable release 5.0 will be deployed soon. There are some important points with this release:

- Support for MediaWiki < 1.19 has been dropped. Support for LTS 1.19 and above will be kept until fandom wikis were updated

- A lot of methods and classes which are deprecated for 5 years and more were removed. This includes all textlib functions which must be imported from textlib now and are no longer accessable directly from pywikibot module. The removal was announced previously by a FutureWarning. Please check your code, take attention to FutureWarning hints and refer the roadmap where other changed are announced.

- Deprecated script options were removed and are no longer functional.

Other changes:

- The -help option does show global options anymore. You get them via -help:global or by the pwb.py wrapper script pwb -help. By the way the pwb.py wrapper is able to ignore misspellings for script calls bot also can handle all global options even a user script does not call the handle_args() function e.g. to change the default lang code and family. Refer pwb.py (without parameters) to see the usage.

- APISite.recentchanges() does no longer accept positional arguments

- The new method Page.get_best_claim () retrieves the preferred Claim of a property referring to the given page

- BasePage.has_deleted_revisions() method was added deleted revs can be retrieved without the deletedhistory right

- Siteinfo.get() loads data via API instead from cache if expiry parameter is True

- Wikibase entities are loaded when necessary

- some circular imports are solved

refer https://github.com/wikimedia/pywikibot/blob/master/ROADMAP.rst for the full changelog after

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/pywikibot/core/+/630579 has been merged.

There are some outstanding bugfixes and improvements waiting for review at gerrit; see if you can help.

Best

xqt