[Mediawiki-i18n] removing messages from core

[Niklas Laxström]

On 20 June 2013 03:35, S Page <spage at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> (Premature clicking)
>
> https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/67233/ remotes the old-style login and
> create account forms from core. The new forms have different messages, e.g.
> no more colons in English labels and there's no more use of the  combined
> "Log in / create account".  So I removed the old messages from
> MessagesEn.php, MessagesQqq.php and messages.inc.
>
> Raimond Spekking pointed out
>
>
>>  'userlogin' message is still used by the OpenID extension.
>>
>> Maybe more of these very old messages are used by other extensions.Needs
>> investigation, partly revert recommended in the meantime.
>
> Good point, 'userlogin' is also used by MobileFrontEnd and some unmaintained
> signup extensions.  I will prepare a patch that restores it.
>
> I searched for message keys in single quotes and it seems the other messages
> I removed (yourname yourpasswordagain userlogin userloginnocreate nologin
> nologinlink gotaccount gotaccountlink userlogin-resetlink
> createaccountreason ) are unused by the the extensions in 1.22wmf7.
>
> * Should I restore those other messages as well?
> * Is there a process for deprecated or obsoleting a message in core?
> * Should I put something in MessagesQqq.php saying "Unused in core but some
> extensions still use it"

I'd only restore messages that are known to be used and mark them
clearly, for example introducing new deprecated section in
MessagesEn.php (or maybe one section for each version of mw where
messages have been deprecated) so that we wont forget to remove them
in few releases or so. qqq is mostly for translators, so it is not the
best place to put this info.

In addition, depending how much time you have, I'd submit fixes to the
affected extensions to change them to use their own message. Or just
file bugs, though that is not very effective for most extensions.
There seems to be some disagreement on the community whether it is
okay to break unmaintained extensions even if they are to blame.

  -Niklas

--
Niklas Laxström