On 23/02/12 05:42, Krinkle wrote:
To avoid future breakages or mass migration while a replacement[1] is already on the horizon, I think it's a good time as any to declare this feature as "legacy" and therefor feature and bugfix froozen until deprecated/superseeded by a more modern system[1].
I don't think it has to be frozen, as I have repeatedly said on Bugzilla and IRC. Like HTML screen scrapers, if you maintain one of these bots, you have to expect the input format to change from time to time.
The bots provide an important service, which is why I asked that the bot authors be notified of any changes well in advance of deployment, so that there would be no disruption. That didn't happen, so we had to revert the format changes.
Note that the changes to the IRC format were unintentional and were detrimental for both humans and bots reading the feed.
There's no guarantee that the bot authors will want to switch to XMPP even if it is more modern and more stable. When I spoke to some of them previously, they indicated that familiarity with IRC client libraries and scripting languages like the one provided by mIRC was very important.
Declaring the IRC interface "deprecated" would be unpopular among the many human users of this feature, inside and outside Wikimedia.
-- Tim Starling