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(a)gmail.com
To: wikitech-l(a)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(a)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
1. testing those 50 or so occurrences
2. finding the other less obvious occurrences
3. 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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