r111168 MediaWiki - Code Review archive

Omgosh. Is that really it gone?

Hmm, so how does one access article related information now?

I have the following simple code, and couldn't see how to port it to MW 1.20, despite searching for quite a while:

$wgHooks['SkinTemplateNavigation'][] = 'wfAlterEditPageLinkHook2';
function wfAlterEditPageLinkHook2( &$vector, &$links ) {
        global $wgTitle, $wgArticle;
        if( array_key_exists( 'edit', $links['views'] ) && $wgTitle->isContentPage() && $wgArticle !== null && $wgArticle->isCurrent() ){
                if( $wgTitle->exists() ) {
                        $links['views']['edit']['href'] = Title::newFromText( 'Spezial:Spiel_bearbeiten/'. $wgTitle->getPrefixedDBkey() )->getLocalUrl();
                } else {
                        $links['views']['edit']['href'] = Title::newFromText( 'Spezial:Neues_Spiel/'. $wgTitle->getPrefixedDBkey() )->getLocalUrl();
                }
        }
        return true;
}

(the code redirects the edit link to a special page, but only if the page viewed is the current version of the article).

Could you document how to do something like this when using MW 1.20? The best place to document this would probably be Manual:$wgArticle.

As much as I would love to see us ditch a lot of the globals, this is not the time to make this change. Please revert.

See this email for more: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/58678

If we really aren't going to kill this now ( Why exactly is this not the time. Will it ever be the time? ). Could we perhaps have a class similar to StubObject, that basically just issues a wfDeprecated warning the first time someone uses the global, to further discourage people from using the global.

We deprecated this less than a year ago (in r88588). This commit is doing nothing other than breaking things that might otherwise actually work, and there's no followup work with tangible end-user benefit that depends on this being gone. Most of the major Linux distros are still shipping a version of MediaWiki prior to this even being deprecated.

When will we ever remove this? When we need to. Certainly not before someone gets around to writing the documentation that Tbleher requested.

It would be just fine to throw deprecation errors upon use of this global, assuming there's a reasonable way to do that.

Sorry, my original post here was kind of saying different things from what I intended to say. I took the statement "this is not the time to make this change" to mean not the time due to some short-term issues or something. I'm not opposed to leaving that in there for several more releases (especially because removing it doesn't provide any tangible benefits as you said), but if we were to remove it in 1.20, now would be the time, right at the start of 1.20 development.

I'll look into seeing if we can do wfDeprecated warnings for globals in some sort of sane way.

At the very least there should be a list of all deprecated global variables, preferably in RELEASE-NOTES. Removed global variables should also be mentioned in the RELEASE-NOTES, as a breaking change.

I stumbled across this revision and it really caught me by surprise. I have a few extensions that use $wgArticle, they were written long before $wgArticle was deprecated. How should I have known that $wgArticle was deprecated? If I had not seen this commit by accident, I would probably have searched for a while why my extension didn't work anymore after upgrading to trunk.

Calling wfDeprecated sounds like a good idea, but there should also be a list of all deprecations, so it is easier to search for deprecated functions and globals in custom extensions.

From a deloper perspective, I can understand the impulse to remove old, deprecated code to make the code "cleaner". But please keep in mind that this makes it much harder to use your work outside of WMF.

Reverted in r111297 and I'm also going to expand the documentation.

Excellent, thanks iAlex!