There have been several proposals for removal without deprecation in the past few days, each with more impact on existing code - from "virtually certain nobody ever used" to "the fix is trivial". I know it is annoying as heck to keep outdated code, but if you ask me, unless there is an immediate compelling reason for the removal the deprecation policy should not be bypassed. And in my opinion "I did not find any extension that uses this method" is not sufficient. Not all extensions/skins are hosted on WMF servers. And being trivial to fix does not help, either. It would be great if everybody could monitor MW master, run CI tests regularly for all their extensions and fix any breakages. Unfortunately many people do not have the time to do that, so they need the deprecation period (and at times the deprecation popups to even notice that something is wrong). So, I would request to keep the clearCache() method for the foreseen deprecation period. (And generally speaking, though not explicitly required by the deprecation policy and probably not applicable in this instance, it would be great if deprecated methods would actually be kept in working condition and not reduced to a (literally) empty husk just to stay in line with the letter of the policy.)

There are three "probability qualifiers" in that sentence (seems, probable, basically). You just don't know if somebody now has to fix their code.

It is a one-line change from your perspective. For the maintainer it will be picking up the extension after some time, fixing some unrelated bug, running the tests and have them fail. Finding the problem should be easy enough (method not found), but they then have to investigate, why that stupid method is missing all of a sudden and find and understand the recommended solution, digging through commits and phabricator tickets. They then need to apply the solution which, if they want clean self-contained commits, includes committing or stashing their current code, opening a new branch, applying the fix, running the test, merging the branch to master, picking up the original branch and rebasing it. All of this on top of the small bug fix they actually came for.

I agree that there is a trade-off to be done. I disagree about expecting code to be put where it is visible to core developers. I do appreciate that you go and look for where the functionality that you are working on is used outside core. But ultimately MW is publishing a public interface and it is unreasonable to expect all consumers of that interface to "register" and publish their code as well.

The difference is that in that case the test would have run through, throwing just a notice and the call to the deprecated function could have been removed another day.

Of course, if they did not want to deal with breakages, that maintainer should not have pulled MW master in the first place and should have just worked on whatever MW version they left off of a few months ago when they last worked on their extension.

True. I don't know how other people do it, but I usually only scan the release notes for big changes and otherwise rely on deprecation notes to pop up. Doing otherwise would require me to maintain a register of all MW core functions called from my extensions and cross-checking it by hand.

So to give my perspective as an "outsider": My day to day job is to write MediaWiki extensions for a wiki-farm called Liquipedia. We are mostly hopping LTS version, so even deprecation for two versions doesn't necessarily mean much to us here. Generally I just install a new MediaWiki version on dev and then test all of our extensions thewre until they work, without bothering the live version of our wikis. The talk here seems to be mostly about people that "blindly" upgrade their wiki, and I agree there will always be issues with those, no matter the deprecation method. If you don't update to every version, you might never see a deprecation notice, as the next version you are upgrading to is not necessarily the next version of MediaWiki released, and if you are updating to every version you might still not be able to fx your own extensions or you might not even check for deprecation notices (mind they only show up with the right dev params). I totally agree on directly removing functions that have been functionless for years like the one we had recently that didn't work since sometime 2009 or so, no question about that, but I'm not so sure about working functions. There is a lot of consideration going into writing MediaWiki extensions, and there might be good reasons to not host a MediaWiki extension on Wikimedia git repositories. I have seen very specialized MediaWiki extensions that would not work without outside code (especially extensions allowing login with outside userdatabases and extensions querying certain internal APIs come to mind), so I don't think using only Wikimedia hosted repositories is a good indication. Generally I think deprecation periods that are supposed to actually be helpful should always pass at least one LTS release, as those reach a bigger audience. Deprecation wise, I personally feel like it only makes a difference if deprecations always survive the next LTS release, as most less regular wiki owners are likely to jump LTS versions. If there is no waiting for LTS releases, then deprecation is somewhat pointless in my point of view, since these policies are mostly in place for third party wikis. I hope this point of view is helpful to you, if there are any further questions regarding our own workflow, feel free to ask and I'll try to answer to the best of my ability. Alex "FO-nTTaX" Winkler Head of Liquipedia Development https://liquipedia.net/ - https://www.teamliquid.com/ Am 31.07.2018 um 14:53 schrieb Aryeh Gregor: _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l