On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 2:39 PM, John Mark Vandenberg <[email protected]>
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/000069.html
 [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/000062.html
 [4]: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/160798/
 [5]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API/Architecture_work/Planning#HTMLizing_action.3Dhelp

-- 
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
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