Re: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki RC2UDP feature/bugfix frozen (aka "irc recent changes feed")
On 23/02/12 05:42, Krinkle wrote: > To avoid future breakages or mass migration while a replacement[1] is > already on the horizon, I think it's a good time as any to declare this > feature as "legacy" and therefor feature and bugfix froozen until > deprecated/superseeded by a more modern system[1]. I don't think it has to be frozen, as I have repeatedly said on Bugzilla and IRC. Like HTML screen scrapers, if you maintain one of these bots, you have to expect the input format to change from time to time. The bots provide an important service, which is why I asked that the bot authors be notified of any changes well in advance of deployment, so that there would be no disruption. That didn't happen, so we had to revert the format changes. Note that the changes to the IRC format were unintentional and were detrimental for both humans and bots reading the feed. There's no guarantee that the bot authors will want to switch to XMPP even if it is more modern and more stable. When I spoke to some of them previously, they indicated that familiarity with IRC client libraries and scripting languages like the one provided by mIRC was very important. Declaring the IRC interface "deprecated" would be unpopular among the many human users of this feature, inside and outside Wikimedia. -- Tim Starling ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
[Wikitech-l] MediaWiki RC2UDP feature/bugfix frozen (aka "irc recent changes feed")
Hi, Following recent events that unexpectatly broke many wiki bots monitoring wikis in real-time via the irc recent changes feed (powered by routing localized strings emitted by MediaWiki's rc2udp output to an IRC server), The feed is mostly used by bots which have hardcoded most enviromental variables, and had to do so since MediaWiki never offered a way to get this parse information dynamically from an API (i.e. to the i18n messages used and the meaning of the numbered replacement variables). To avoid future breakages or mass migration while a replacement[1] is already on the horizon, I think it's a good time as any to declare this feature as "legacy" and therefor feature and bugfix froozen until deprecated/superseeded by a more modern system[1]. Pretty much the only aspect that is still free to change (and always has) is the content of the i18n messages (e.g. it's totally fine if translatewiki commits a patch that changes [[MediaWiki:1movedto2/de]] from `verschob „[[$1]]“ nach „[[$2]]“` to `verschieb [[$1]] auf [[$2]]` (which would affect log comments of German content-langauge wikis such as in irc.wikimedia.org/#de.wikipedia).. as long as the message is still stored at message-key "1movedto2" and $1 is origin and $2 is target. Same goes for messages like "MediaWiki:Revertpage", "MediaWiki:Autosumm-blank" and "MediaWiki:Autosumm-replace". Which aren't log messages, but are used the same way (edit summary is parsed and action is determined). I hope we can "soon" start focussing on the new system [1], start elaborating on what the needs are, use cases, requirements and come up with a design specification and implementation. Related events: bug 34508[2], bug 30245[3]. -- Krinkle [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Structured_data_push_notification_support_for_recent_changes [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34508#c16 [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30245 [3] http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/IRCBot-Messages ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
