I tried to make them as similar as possible in r9901 [1] but the differ

fundamentally which makes full adoption somehow hard. I would sugest to
use the current one, to check if the code move worked (and did not
introduce errors) and afterwards (some time later) adopt it further to
be more "rewrite-ish"... (may be that step should be done by someone
familar with trunk AND rewrite - as I am using trunk only... ;)

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/pywikipedia/9901

Hope that suits you fine?