Topic on Manual talk:Pywikibot

There was a discussion in April on the mailing list about having a deprecation policy based on the one for the MediaWiki interface. Did this go anywhere?

I am asking because I have been bitten by a breaking change - specifically, this removal of APISite.getuserinfo() broke my bot on Toolforge. I am not saying the removal was unreasonable (2+ month after the "deprecated" decorator was added sounds reasonable) but there is no documentation of expectations anywhere I could find.

(My bot breaking is 95% my fault, since I did not notice the breakage in timely fashion, nor did I regularly review the Pywikibot code for deprecation tags, so even a one-year deprecation period would not have helped me much, but still.)

The deprecation warning was shown every time you are running your bot. There is a warning in our changelog for the stable release [1]. With 6.4 Pywikibot follows semantic versioning. All deprecated code will be removed with version 7.0.0 (comming at the end of this month I guess) and new deprecations are kept until 8.0 is deployed (probably until end of 2022). Please also have a look at the current deprecations [3], the code changes comming with 7.0 [4] (more to come here!) and pay attention to the deprecation warnings of your scripts.

[1] https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot/master/changelog.html#id6 [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/Development/Guidelines#Deprecation_Policy [3] https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot/stable/changelog.html#deprecations [4] https://doc.wikimedia.org/pywikibot/master/changelog.html#current-release-changes