New subject: Can we make the life of extension developers easier?

7 Sep 2011

On the other hand, if you never clean up cruft, you advance the date at which a rewrite
from scratch becomes necessary.  Code which hasn't had the entropy removed becomes
brittle and hard to understand.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone

-----Original message-----
From: Rob Lanphier &lt;robla(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
To: Wikimedia developers &lt;wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;
Sent: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 06:23:45 GMT+00:00
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make the life of extension developers easier?

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Brion Vibber &lt;brion(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote:
...
  Generally speaking, we should only throw warnings or
remove old interfaces
 that are actively broken (do not work correctly) or can no longer be sanely
 maintained -- removing a deprecated interface is a fairly extreme step and
 should never be done just to make things look cleaner.

 There may be little or even *negative* benefit to going around and changing
 all the calling code to use the new interface. I've seen *lots* of
 regressions in commits that swap something to a new interface without taking
 into account how the interface actually changed, and they're harder to track
 down because the changes are often buried in generic code clean-up.

+1000.

Rob

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