Re: Scream for mercy: breaking changes

Max Semenik schreef:
> Sorry, this is going to be a blatant rant...
>
> Request: http://www.wikia.com/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&cmtitle=Category:Wikia_categories&cmcategory=Wikia_categories&format=xml&cmlimit=500
> Result:
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
> <api>
>      <error code="cmtitleandcategory" info="The cmcategory and cmtitle parameters can&#039;t be used
together" />
> </api>
>   
I hadn't thought about the fact that people might wanna make their code 
work for both pre-change and post-change APIs this way, which is kinda 
stupid. I'll remember to do this better in the future (in fact, 1.13 
will have a change towards that goal). It should also be noted that this 
is kind of a transition phase: the code has only been like this for a 
few weeks, after that cmcategory is ignored completely.
> The moral: please think of long-term consequences of your changes, if
> you change the way a piece of code works, at least (pleeeease!) allow
> people to fall back without much PITA.
>   
action=paraminfo (which IIRC was introduced before cmtitle) does a lot 
of that. Also, breaking changes are announced on the mediawiki-api 
mailing list, which you should really be subscribed to if you're 
developing an application that uses the API.
> And can this mistake be fixed at least in service releases for 1.12?
>   
Why would it? Just upgrade to 1.13 if you're gonna upgrade anyway. 
Service releases only ever address security problems.