On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 5:07 AM, Erwin Dokter erwin@darcoury.nl wrote:
This has been in the works for *years* now. How much more time do we need already?
It's been in the works for years, yes, but there hasn't been a specific time-frame for removal before, and the deprecation hasn't been as widely publicised on the wikis as it could have been. Now that we have a specific time-frame we see people on e.g. enwiki's technical village pump [1] discussing in earnest what should be done, but there hasn't been this type of discussion on this issue on enwiki before to my knowledge.
Fixing this properly would require a lot of things to happen. For example, I think we will need: * A clear guide on how to update the deprecated code. The mailing list announcement [2] and the legacy javascript page [3] are a good start, but having one document with code examples that is specific to the change would make it easier for less experienced script writers to work out how to update their code. * A short, easy-to-understand guide for end users who are just loading scripts with importScript. * A list of which users are affected, and what scripts they would need to fix. * A bot / MassMessage run to notify all of these users that there is something they need to fix. * A list of unmaintained scripts that need to be fixed by community members. (If there is a way to figure out which pre-Gadgets-2.0 scripts are actually in use, then even better.)
With all of this machinery set in motion, I think we could make a sizable dent in the backlog of scripts that need fixing. However, I imagine that even with this, fixing everything that needs fixing would take more than a month. A lot depends on the number of unmaintained scripts and the difficulty of fixing them, and we also need to factor in things like requesting global interface editor rights, which takes one week at the moment.
Also, note that I'm not trying to imply that the things in the list above should be done by the WMF. Some or all of them could be handled by the community, but again, this would take time.
For those interested, I proposed some similar ideas to the above last year on Phabricator, as a standardised procedure of deprecating public-facing MediWiki code. [4]
Strad
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Breakin... [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-March/085113.html [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Legacy_JavaScript [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114384