[Mediawiki-api] query.php scheduled to die Monday, August 25

[Brion Vibber]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

As you may know, the current MediaWiki API was based on an earlier
interface, the BotQuery extension accessed via query.php.

During development of the new API, the old query.php was left in place
on Wikimedia's sites to provide backwards-compatibility for tools and
user scripts using it.

However it's a bit of a burden to keep it around -- being nearly
unmaintained it suffers from "bitrot":

* Queries sometimes break due to backend changes

* Security problems are sometimes discovered and must be patched


We've been reluctant to just turn it off since some user scripts still
use it (Lupin's Popups are rumored to be the most popular such), but I'd
like to go ahead and plan to kill it.

I'm currently scheduling the Death of query.php for Monday, August 25 --
a little less than 4 weeks from today.

This gives interested parties a chance to either migrate their scripts
to the current API ahead of time, or to start work on an adaptor to
replace query.php -- transforming queries to send them to the new API
and transforming the results back to a format compatible with the old one.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkiQ760ACgkQwRnhpk1wk46VGwCeOLp5Ynuw48ikLv8YztyB0kIc
eKoAnjPhey51pkojh7mTT4j7BYz95gYZ
=QZC+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----