Maybe someone with enough time and knowledge can fork compat and keep it alive...
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2015 13:03:03 +1000 From: jayvdb@gmail.com To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] API BREAKING CHANGE: Default continuation mode for action=query will change at the end of this month
On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 6:04 AM, Ilya Korniyko intracer@gmail.com wrote:
It would be nice if MediaWiki API _AND_ pywikipedia bot do not deprecate at once.
Now it looks as API: we are deprecating what we promised to deprecated long ago - ok pywikipedia compat: did not handle the deprecation of API before, and are not going to fix copy-pasted in tens of places (not one place, it's never that simple) query builders to support "rawcontinue", we announce compat as discontinued together with the old style API. API deprecation was not coordinated with client library deprecation - not ok
If there is one year gap between two deprecations - ok, bot writers can choose either compat or core, and their bots can still work. Most users don't use APi directly so it should be the problem of coordination between API and clients developers.
On the pywikipedia side, it has been unofficially deprecated for a while, and the intention was to decommission compat as gracefully as possible, with Wikimania as the final killing ground.
The pywikibot developers roughly hashed out a decommissioning plan at the Lyon hackathon, and worked with WMF staff to start doing impact analysis. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T101214
Then the MW API continuation breakage was announced post Lyon. Hmm.
The continuation problem in pywikipedia / compat is not so much those 50 or so occurrences where continuation bugs appear to exist, but
- testing those 50 or so occurrences
- finding the other less obvious occurrences
- scripts people have written using compat's query.GetData may also
be broken, as it doesnt do continuation.
With a lot of wasted effort, 1 & 2 might be resolved so that 'compat' code works, and someone could create a hack on query.GetData which adds continuation for scripts not yet adapted to do continuation. However the active pywikibot developers (approx. 5 people?) are focused on making core better , including about 10 complex patches under review that improve its query continuation algorithms, and making core more compatible with 'compat' to ease the pain of switching to core.
If anyone submits patches for compat continuation bugs affecting them, they will be reviewed (usually by people familiar with compat) with the presumption that the patch author has tested it, and merged if there are no major problems.
-- John Vandenberg
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