On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:13 PM, Yuri Astrakhan yastrakhan@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 7:44 PM, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
The API currently emits a warning if a query continuation mode isnt selected.
I guess on July 1 the API could emit an error, and not return any query data. Then the data isnt going to cause weird behaviour - it will break, properly.
Hmm, this is actually an interesting idea - would it make sense to error on missing "continue" or "rawcontinue" for all action=query for about a month or two, so that everyone notices it right away and gets updated, and than resume with the new behavior?
I saw at least one major bot had all of its actual continuation uses fixed after the first notification, but did not bother to fix cases where it was receiving the warning but was never going to continue the query. Others may well have done the same.
For example, if a client wants to get the current content for enwiki's Main Page, it might hit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvpro.... That returns continuation (and the warning) in case the client would want further revisions, but the client here doesn't. Similar cases could be made for fetching the most recent protection log entry of a page, the imageinfo for the current version of an image, and so on.
The current plan, as shown in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/160223/, is to output a different warning for some period of time after the changeover. People investigating the sudden failure of their bot/script/gadget would hopefully see that.