Hi everyone,

After Niklas mentioned in another thread that the i18n team was effectively ignoring the code slush, I decided to do some spot checking to see what couldn't wait. What I saw was a lot of backwards compatibility breakage that's going to make releasing 1.19 and the eventual 1.20 release a lot harder, and make life generally miserable for third party users of MediaWiki that just want to stay on top of security releases and maybe want to install a new extension or two, but have extensions that they can't afford the dev resources to update. I've been there myself, and it sucks.

At a minimum, we need to start marking backwards-compatibility breaking changes. So, I've created the "backcompat" keyword, and started the task of marking these. I'd like help in marking these things, since I suspect we've got a lot of work before we can release a 1.19 tarball.

Here's the list so far: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/tag/backcompat

It's hard enough to make things work. Expending effort trying to make things *not* work is bound to be more successful than anyone is banking on. Please stop this.

Thanks Rob