On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 1:17 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.orgwrote:
We can support both for a long time, and eventually drop support for the old properties.
What about the page history, though? Suddenly showing completely-wrongly-sized images in the history when you eventually drop support seems like it might be a bad idea.
The long-term plan here, as I understand it, is to (a) store better software version information with page sources, and (b) archive parsed versions of old pages. When viewing an old page, you'd also be using an archived copy of the page parser, etc. Without getting into the details, there are plans to provide better archive/migration support so that we can introduce new features/behavior changes without breaking all history.
That said, my preferred proposal (adding a new 'square' image option) is explicitly for the short/medium term. It doesn't break backward compatibility, and it doesn't overly complicate the already-very-hairy image options parser (see https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/120856). In the future we can move to semantic options / change all the defaults to square / have cats and dogs living together. By then we'll have built good migration mechanisms and can remove 'square' when it's no longer needed. --scott