On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Victor Vasiliev vasilvv@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, you just have to worry that query.php is replaced with api.php, which may be then replaced with something else. And also, I went through the mediawiki-api archives and found about 9 breaking changes for API. Pretty stable, isn't it? :)
I don't understand why there are ever breaking changes in the API. THE API SHOULD NEVER EVER EVER CHANGE. IT SHOULD BE A STABLE INTERFACE. There needs to be a policy, set in stone, not negotiable, that behavior for a given API query should NEVER change in an incompatible fashion. If something is inconsistent it should be deprecated and a new function instituted to replace it. The old deprecated way could then be marked for a few years (say, three years, or at least one year) before finally being removed. Authors of bot frameworks should be encouraged to write code checking for <deprecated> or whatever and having their framework raise a warning of some kind to inform them that they should update it.
This really seems like a no-brainer to me. But, I'm not an API developer, so . . .