After a very productive talk with legoktm @IRC, it seems some of these changes have already been made as part of the rewrite at <a href="http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/pywikipedia/branches/rewrite/">http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/pywikipedia/branches/rewrite/</a> documented at <a href="http://botwiki.sno.cc/wiki/Rewrite">http://botwiki.sno.cc/wiki/Rewrite</a> , and only a few things remain:<div>

<br></div><div>* GIT migration</div><div>    Mediawiki will not support SVN forever. I wouldn&#39;t want to copy and break away completely - history is very important for maintenance (Yes, i saw the previous GIT posts here)</div>

<div><br></div><div>* Python3 migration<br></div><div>    Guido started it for a very good reason. Much better Unicode, cleaner libraries.</div><div><br></div><div>* Directory structure</div><div>   I propose two separate root dirs:</div>

<div>       pywikibot\ - current code<br></div><div>       pywikibot3\ - Python3 rewrite</div><div>   The directories should be at the same level, and not as branch, because we will never be able to merge them back together - anyone who wants to continue using Python26+ and older features will keep using pywikibot, and all the new code plus migrated scripts will move to pywikibot3</div>

<div><br></div><div>* API only</div><div>    No need to maintain complex and cumbersome Special:Export and page  scraping methods. If mediawiki installation doesn&#39;t support API - they don&#39;t want bot access. If their installation is over 5 years old, they can use older pywiki framework version.</div>

<div>    There is still xml dump support in pywiki, but many functions it seems will not work properly, so maybe we should remove that as well.<br><div><div><br></div></div></div><div><div>* Higher-level HTTP library</div>

</div><div>    Not as sure about this yet, but it seems python Requests is a better library for the API calls than the httplib2 - for complexity and cleanliness reasons. See <a href="http://docs.python-requests.org/">http://docs.python-requests.org/</a></div>

<div><br></div><div>When can we start? :)</div>