TL;DR: I'm proposing deprecating a bunch of parameters. See
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164106.
In the action API, there are two ways to parse a page/revision: using
action=parse, or using the rvparse parameter to action=query&prop=revisions.
Similarly, there are two ways to get a diff: using action=compare, or using
parameters such as rvdiffto to action=query&prop=revisions. And then
there's action=expandtemplates versus the rvexpandtemplates parameter to
prop=revisions. This is a somewhat annoying bit of code duplication.
Further, the prop=revisions versions of these features have somewhat
strange behavior. rvparse forces rvlimit=1. rvdiffto and related parameters
will sometimes output "notcached" with no way to directly handle the
situation.
So, I propose deprecating all of these parameters. The parameters that
would be deprecated are the 'rvdifftotext', 'rvdifftotextpst',
'rvdiffto',
'rvexpandtemplates', 'rvgeneratexml', 'rvparse', and
'rvprop=parsetree'
parameters to prop=revisions, and the similarly named parameters to
prop=deletedrevisions, list=allrevisions, and list=alldeletedrevisions.
Following the normal action API deprecation policy, they'd output warnings
but would continue to function until usage drops sufficiently or until it
becomes too much trouble to fix them, and they wouldn't receive new feature
development.
If anyone would object to this plan, please reply at
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164106, or here if you really hate
Phabricator. If there aren't major objections, I'll probably do the
deprecation in the next week or two. Thanks.
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation