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

[Magnus Manske]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 11:48 PM, Brion Vibber <brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
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> 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.

So far, I've found two things query.php does which api.php does not:
* give bit depth of image (not exactly critical for my purposes, though)
* for redirect pages, give the redirect target (this could affect a
tool of mine)

I'll report more as I find them.

Magnus