Hi Arthur!
We were indeed thinking of different scenarios. I was thinking of someone who
runs a wiki with a couple of one-off private extensions running, and now wants
to update. They may well test that everything is still working with the new
version of MediaWiki, but I think they would be unlikely to test with
development settings enabled. The upgrade guide doesn't mention this, and even
if it did, I doubt many people would remember to enable it. So they won't notice
deprecations until the code is removed.
I understand your scenario to refer to an extension developer explicitly testing
whether their extension is working with the next release, and try it in their
development environment. They would see the deprecation warnings, and address
them. But in that scenario, would it be so much worse to see fatal errors
instead of deprecation warnings?
This is not meant to be a loaded question. I'm trying to understand what the
practical consequences would be. Fatal errors are of course less nice, but in a
testing environment, not a real problem, right? I suppose deprecation warnings
can provide better information that fatal errors would, but one can also find
this information in the release notes, once it is clear what to look for.
Also note that this would only affect private extensions. Public extensions
would receive support up front, and early removal of the obsolete code would be
blocked until all known extensions are fixed.
Thank you for your thoughts!
-- daniel
Am 31.08.20 um 20:54 schrieb Arthur Smith:
Hmm, maybe we're talking past one another here?
I'm assuming a developer of an
extension who is interested in testing a new release - if we have a version that
has things deprecated vs completely removed, that allows a quick check to see if
the deprecated code affects them without going back into their own code (which
may have been developed partly by somebody else so just reading release notes
wouldn't clue them in that there might be a problem).
--
Daniel Kinzler
Principal Software Engineer, Core Platform
Wikimedia Foundation