On 23/02/12 05:42, Krinkle wrote:
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].
I don't think it has to be frozen, as I have repeatedly said on
Bugzilla and IRC. Like HTML screen scrapers, if you maintain one of
these bots, you have to expect the input format to change from time to
time.
The bots provide an important service, which is why I asked that the
bot authors be notified of any changes well in advance of deployment,
so that there would be no disruption. That didn't happen, so we had to
revert the format changes.
Note that the changes to the IRC format were unintentional and were
detrimental for both humans and bots reading the feed.
There's no guarantee that the bot authors will want to switch to XMPP
even if it is more modern and more stable. When I spoke to some of
them previously, they indicated that familiarity with IRC client
libraries and scripting languages like the one provided by mIRC was
very important.
Declaring the IRC interface "deprecated" would be unpopular among the
many human users of this feature, inside and outside Wikimedia.
-- Tim Starling