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