The easiest/practical solution I think is branching. That keeps the code clean and saves time by not having to continuously test the extension against all versions you want to support.
If your extension was/is hosted in Wikimedia SVN, then users of MediaWiki 1.17 can simply select the "1.17" option in the downloader which is the branched version of the extension as it was when 1.17 was being developed. In that version your extension would still have the old method calls to Skin which work fine with 1.17. If your extension is hosted by yourself or elsewhere, you can do similar thing. Create an "mw-1.17" branch of your extension from the commit that last worked with 1.17 (or just the commit that was active when 1.17 was developed). And instruct users to download the branch instead of trunk if they run an older version of MediaWiki. Extension:SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi [1] for example, has branches going back to 1.10 (!). Click "Download snapshot" and you'll see a dropdown menu. Those old versions are not maintained or supported, they are provided as a fixed moment in time for users of any mediawiki version. So those old version will not have the latest new features. But, contrary to tags, if a bug fix has to be backported, it can still be committed to that branch just fine. Depending on what you want, this could mean double maintenance, however in most cases one doesn't backport new functionality to an old version. Instead you develop in "trunk", and whenever a new MediaWiki release is started, you create a branch for the (then old) mediawiki version, and then continue to work on trunk again for the current MediaWiki release. -- Krinkle [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi On Apr 20, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Jim Hu wrote: > We have some extensions that used the deprecated linking methods from skin > objects. I've changed these to use Linker::LinkKnown for 1.18+, but now they > don't work with 1.17 or below. Is there a recommended code practice that > works for both? > > Thanks. > ===================================== > Jim Hu > Professor > Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics > 2128 TAMU > Texas A&M Univ. > College Station, TX 77843-2128 > 979-862-4054 > > > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
