*(Apologies for cross-posting)*
Hi all,
This is an announcement of a significant change to 3rd party Wikibase
installs that still use lib/WikibaseLib.php as an entry point.
*On September 30*, we will remove the lib/WikibaseLib.php file from the
Wikibase code. Wikis which directly load that file in their
LocalSettings.php will then fail to load (after the 1.36 release of
MediaWiki and Wikibase, if they do not track the master branch).
The file lib/Wikibase.php used to be the entry point of the WikibaseLib
extension. Directly loading this file has not been necessary since the
earliest days of Wikibase – it was loaded automatically by the entry points
of the Client and Repo extensions. Nevertheless, lines similar to the
following found their way into some Wikibase installation instructions:
require_once "$IP/extensions/Wikibase/lib/WikibaseLib.php";
If your LocalSettings.php contains such a line, please remove it. It has
not been needed for ages, and soon it will stop working.
This refactoring is part of a project with a twofold objective: (1)
decouple the Wikibase Client and Repo as much as possible and
establish a long-term
strategy for organising the shared logic
<https://doc.wikimedia.org/Wikibase/master/php/adr_0013.html>, and (2) get
both Client and Repo to use the standard extension registration mechanism
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Extension_registration>
to be loaded. The impact of the project is focused on developers who can
now have a clearer view of the code, the modules involved, and their
interactions which makes their lives easier. Also, the maintenance of the
code is now easier. This is the phabricator board
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/4815/> of the project.
If you have any issues or questions, please do not hesitate to ask.
Cheers,
--
Mohammed Sadat
*Community Communications Manager for Wikidata/Wikibase*
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de