On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 9:29 AM, Krinkle
<krinklemail(a)gmail.com> wrote:
A rough timeline:
* 12 May 2014 (1.24wmf4 [9]): Phase 1 – Instrumentation and logging
starts. This
will run for 4 weeks (until June 9).
* 19 May 2014 (1.24wmf5): Phase 2 – "Upgrade and Migrate". This will run
for 3
weeks (upto June 9). The instrumentation continues during this period.
* 1 June 2014 (1.24wmf7) Finalise upgrade.
(...)
Q: When will the upgrade happen?
A: In the next few weeks, once we are happy that the impact is reasonably
low.
An update will be sent to wikitech-l just before this is done as a final
reminder.
This will be well before the MediaWiki 1.24 branch point for extension
authors
looking to maintain compatibility.
I'm not sure this decision makes sense. This would mean that 1.23 shipped
with jQuery 1.8 and 1.24 will ship with jQuery 1.11, without the backwards
compatibility plugin. I don't see how this helps extension authors, and it
will be a nuisance for wiki webmasters who will have to deal with the
breakage of all the not-so-well maintained extensions, without any
transition period where they could identify and fix/replace them, when they
do the 1.23 -> 1.24 upgrade. There should be a major version which includes
the migration plugin.
I disagree. These jQuery features were deprecated many years ago.
jQuery.browser was deprecated in 1.3.0[1][2]
* 2009-01 (over 5 years ago)
* MediaWiki 1.16 shipped jQuery v1.3.2
jQuery#live was deprecated in 1.7.0[3][4]
* 2011-11 (over 2 years ago)
* MediaWiki 1.19 shipped jQuery 1.7.1
Etc. etc.
They've been deprecated for a long time now (at least one or three major releases). So
it's not like it all came out of nowhere. These are not deprecations, it's the
removal of deprecated features.
MediaWiki 1.24 is a major release and this major change (potentially breaking change) has
appropriate release notes. I don't think there is an obligation here to maintain
compatibility with extensions yet another release.
Extensions are branched at the same time as core. There is no assumption that an
unmaintained extension will remain working with a newer MediaWiki core version
(practically every release we have a few minor breaking changes that require changes to
extensions, this is no different).
Also, shipping with the Migrate extension is essentially just shipping the old version of
jQuery. We've been doing that already since MediaWiki 1.21 by simply not upgrading
jQuery. It's been several releases since; that time is over now.
In addition, I think it's a bad idea to release MediaWiki with the Migrate plugin
enabled by default. Is an odd environment to provide/support (a bit like trying to support
IE8 in IE7 compat mode; people have a hard enough time already with different IE versions,
avoid mutations if possible).
See also my comments on