On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 3:29 PM, Adam Baso <abaso(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Thats the main question :) To copy the dialog from gerrit: the API only and the incategory: etc). returning it should might cause at best worse I thought it might be useful to get more opinions than our two. Erik B.

On 07/30/2015 02:06 PM, Erik Bernhardson wrote: What gerrit change is this about? Can you provide a link? :) -- Legoktm

To summarize Dan's comments: damned if you do, damned if you don't. I lean more toward helping the less sophisticated user by default, and trusting the more sophisticated user to do the right thing. I'd say bot creators are more sophisticated than most human users, who are more sophisticated than most bots. So, if the community of bot creators is generally responsive to changes to the API and default behavior, and this change is well communicated beforehand, they should be able to adapt as needed. On the other hand, if there are lots of orphaned bots out there doing good work, we might break some of them. On the other other hand, someone should find those bots new homes. I also feel like humans users expect and deserve the best results we can give them, so I lean more towards making the change the default. A more complex and more general approach might be to version the API... though that's a whole 'nother can of worms. But it would allow API users to expect a consistent set of features for the life of the version, and would allow them to upgrade to and adapt to the new version over some time period rather than having to scramble (or just suffer breakage) the day it goes live. This would require serious thinking about what it means to be a version (is it just default flags, or do old versions get or not get feature upgrades), how to indicate versions (including "always the most recent API" and "I'm from the time before API versions"), how long versions live, how many we support concurrently, how to fallback from unsupported versions, etc., etc. But Dan seems like he needs more hobbies, so I'm throwing it out there. —Trey Trey Jones Software Engineer, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 6:38 PM, Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 9:13 AM, Trey Jones <tjones(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Some are, many aren't. Some bots are run by people who barely understand the code, because they took it over from a now-retired user—this is the result of "find[ing] those bots new homes". Others are run by people who are still active in a sense but lack the time or motivation to make many changes. User scripts and gadgets can be in an even worse situation, as the original maintainer may have retired leaving *no* replacement while others continue to use the script. In a sense there are no "human users" of the API. It's always programs of some sort using it to fetch data to then reformat for display to humans. In a different sense, of course, there are human users, but not the ones you're probably thinking of. These users are the programmers who create these programs. But I don't think this change would be as useful as the recent continuation change, and particularly I don't think it's useful enough to justify the amount of work that would be required to properly communicate it. See T41592, particularly the reasons given for declining it. -- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Senior Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation