On 30 July 2013 04:36, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 1:01 PM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 30 July 2013 09:06, Martijn Hoekstra
<martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> 6. Announce a date from where on saving a page with a transcluded
legacy
> template will be blocked. Expect public
outcry.
> An important consideration that all developers must keep in mind is
that
though
the current syntax is quite horrible, it also serves a purpose,
and
though its existence in itself is quite horrible,
the fact that it is
widely used is completely reasonable.
The question then will be how to keep parsing old versions reasonably.
I suppose we could keep an old wikitext parser around. *shudder*
(Or just punt the question into the long grass. Do old page versions
pull in contemporary versions of the page's templates or use the
current versions? If the latter, then heh, too bad.)
This *sounds* horrible, but is exactly what happens now. If a template
changes, old revisions break. I suppose that if MediaWiki would go for a
change in template semantics, an option besides letting them break, is to
substitute all 'legacy' templates into their parents last revision before
the changeover. How many revisions back one would want to do this and in
what timeframe sounds like a discussion point, but I don't see this as a
far more broken process than template changes cause right now.
That's what we did last time we switched how templates work (the MW 1.2 ->
1.3 transition)
. "Template syntax conversion bot" (or whatever) spidered across the
corpus and created a new top revision as needed, IIRC.
J.
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester