Hi,
Following recent events that unexpectatly broke many wiki bots monitoring wikis in real-time via the irc recent changes feed (powered by routing localized strings emitted by MediaWiki's rc2udp output to an IRC server),
The feed is mostly used by bots which have hardcoded most enviromental variables, and had to do so since MediaWiki never offered a way to get this parse information dynamically from an API (i.e. to the i18n messages used and the meaning of the numbered replacement variables).
To avoid future breakages or mass migration while a replacement[1] is already on the horizon, I think it's a good time as any to declare this feature as "legacy" and therefor feature and bugfix froozen until deprecated/superseeded by a more modern system[1].
Pretty much the only aspect that is still free to change (and always has) is the content of the i18n messages (e.g. it's totally fine if translatewiki commits a patch that changes [[MediaWiki:1movedto2/de]] from `verschob „[[$1]]“ nach „[[$2]]“` to `verschieb [[$1]] auf [[$2]]` (which would affect log comments of German content-langauge wikis such as in irc.wikimedia.org/#de.wikipedia).. as long as the message is still stored at message-key "1movedto2" and $1 is origin and $2 is target. Same goes for messages like "MediaWiki:Revertpage", "MediaWiki:Autosumm-blank" and "MediaWiki:Autosumm-replace". Which aren't log messages, but are used the same way (edit summary is parsed and action is determined).
I hope we can "soon" start focussing on the new system [1], start elaborating on what the needs are, use cases, requirements and come up with a design specification and implementation.
Related events: bug 34508[2], bug 30245[3].
-- Krinkle
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Structured_data_push_not... [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34508#c16 [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30245 [3] http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/IRCBot-Messages