Message: 5 Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 23:31:37 +0400 From: Max Semenik maxsem.wiki@gmail.com To: MediaWiki API announcements & discussion       mediawiki-api@lists.wikimedia.org,    Wikimedia developers       wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikitech-l] Proposed removal of some API output formats Message-ID: 568811305.20120208233137@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Hi, this idea had floated around for quite some time, but now that bug 34257[1] was added to the long list of problems, I would like to step up and start some progress. We[2] propose to remove the following formats[3]:

• WDDX - doesn't seem to be used by anyone. Doesn't look sane either.
• YAML - we don't serve real YAML anyway, currently it's just a subset

of JSON.

• rawfm - was created for debugging the JSON formatter aeons ago, not

useful for anything now.

• txt, dbg, dump - the only reason they were added is that it was

possible to add them, they don't serve the purpose of machine/machine communication.

So, only 3 formats would remain:

• JSON - *the* recommended API format
• XML - evil and clumsy but sadly used too widely to be revoved in the

foreseeable future

• php - this one is used by several extensions and probably by some

third-party reusers, so we won't remove it this time. However, any new uses of it should be discouraged.

We plan to remove the aforementioned formats as soon as MediaWiki 1.19 is branched so that these changes will take effect in 1.20, but would like to hear from you first if there are good reasons why we shouldn't do it or postpone it. Please have your say.

---

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34257 [2] Me and Roan Kattouw, one of API's primary developers [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Data_formats

-- Best regards, Max Semenik ([[User:MaxSem]])

I have scripts that use the txt format. (Things that were originally super hacky shell scripts, that became more permanently run scripts [but still hacky beyond belief]). txt is mostly easy to process with grep (So was the older version of yaml formatting). However, hopefully not too many people were stupid enough to try to parse the api output using grep. (In case anyone is wondering if using shell scripts to access the api is really as bad as it sounds, I assure you its even worse than you think).

If json becomes the new recommended format, does that mean that not passing a format parameter would result in jsonfm instead of xmlfm? (Probably not since the jsonfm pretty printer isn't all that pretty at the moment).

For a stable API, that's far too fast of a deprecation path. We don't even remove core functions that fast (or shouldn't). I'd suggest throwing some kinds of warnings in the output for at least one release (1.20) and then target them for removal in 1.21.

-Chad

+1.

-- -bawolff