Deprecation notice: PWP/perlwikipedia & certain method calls
Mike.lifeguard
If you still use the PWP or perlwikipedia aliases, methods retained for
backward compatibility, or if you use old method call styles, then
please note that these are now officially marked as deprecated, and they
will emit deprecation warnings if you have warnings turned on.
The PWP and perlwikipedia aliases provide backward compatibility with
ancient versions of the Perlwikibot library, but the likelihood of code
used with those ancient versions still working unchanged is
approximately zero. Therefore, the aliases serve no real purpose, and I
have now marked them as deprecated, and if you use warnings (as you
always should), using them will emit a deprecation warning.
During the 3.0 release cycle, several methods were retained solely for
backward compatibility. While they were considered deprecated up to now,
they are now officially so, and these will also emit deprecation warnings.
Finally, I have marked several old call styles as deprecated, and these
will also emit deprecation warnings if used.
I expect that the PWP and perlwikipedia aliases will be removed in the
release after next. The deprecated methods and call styles will probably
be removed in 6 months. The first release including these new
deprecations will be in a few days. I've been reviewing the
documentation. Once that process is complete, I will put out a new release.
This sets the stage to rewrite the library in modern Perl. In
particular, I want to use perl5i and Moose in MediaWiki::Bot's next
generation, as well as a sensible exception mechanism. I don't expect
any work to begin on this until the summer, at least, since I want to
put significant effort into completing some design plans ahead of time.
This will allow us to plan the interface in a much more sane & stable
manner, which will make life easier for client programmers, as well as
myself and other MediaWiki::Bot developers.
For those who aren't aware, perl5i[0] is a pragma that attempts to fix
the embarassing parts of Perl 5. Moose[1] is a postmodern object system.
Both are stable, and are used extensively in the Perl community.
Thanks,
-Mike