On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 2:39 PM, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
[T96942 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T96942] was reported by pywikibot devs almost as soon as we detected that the test wikis were failing in our travis-ci tests.
At 20:22 in the timezone of the main API developer (me).
It was 12 hours before a MediaWiki API fix was submitted to Gerrit,
09:31, basically first thing in the morning for the main API developer. There's really not much to complain about there.
and it took four additional *days* to get merged.
That part does suck.
This also doesnt give clients sufficient time to workaround MediaWiki's wonderful intentional API breakages. e.g. raw continue, which completely broke pywikibot and needed a large chunk of code rewritten urgently, both for pywikibot core and the much older and harder to fix pywikibot compat, which is still used as part of processes that wiki communities rely on.
The continuation change hasn't actually broken anything yet. It's coming soon though. Nor should a "large chunk of code" *need* rewriting, just add one parameter to your action=query requests.
Unless pywikibot was treating warnings as errors and that's what broke it? Or you're referring to unit tests rather than actual breakage? But a notice about the warnings was sent to mediawiki-api-announce in September 2014,[1] a bit over a month before the warnings started.[2]
[1]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api-announce/2014-September/... [2]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/160222/
Another example is the action=help rewrite not being backwards compatible. pywikibot wasnt broken, as it only uses the help module for older MW releases; but it wouldnt surprise me if there are clients that were parsing the help text and they would have been broken.
Comments on that and other proposed changes were requested on mediawiki-api-announce in July 2014,[3] three months before the change[4] was merged. No concerns were raised at the requested location[5] or on the mediawiki-api mailing list.
[3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api-announce/2014-July/00006... [4]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/160798/ [5]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API/Architecture_work/Planning#HTMLizing_acti...