On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 5:07 AM, Erwin Dokter <erwin(a)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#Breakiā¦
[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