For the problem described in task description it is worsen by T226157: Data retrieval may be very long and heavy because of parsing Link during SiteLink initialization.

However this task is still valid; Pywikibot should be able to operate on sites not listed in family page, as it take time to make patches appearing in the stable branch where Toolforge is using; many users running Pywikibot locally usually have an outdated version of Pywikibot.

In T238405#6753718, @Bugreporter wrote:

For the problem described in task description it is worsen by T226157: Data retrieval may be very long and heavy because of parsing Link during SiteLink initialization.

However this task is still valid; Pywikibot should be able to operate on sites not listed in family page, as it take time to make patches appearing in the stable branch where Toolforge is using; many users running Pywikibot locally usually have an outdated version of Pywikibot.

Thanks a lot for your valuable remarks and suggestions. Our stable is deployed in short time after a new site was created e.g with 5.5.0, 5.3.0, 5.0.0, 4.2.0, 4.1.1; the next update is expected shortly with 5.6.0 to support new sites.

With release 5.6 AutoFamily will be supported for Family files wich aren't created or part of the packages. But there are some remaining issues to be solved.

T226157 is indeed a big problem especially when loading the first time which needs 5 minutes to complete. But the second time it is fast and loaded via cache. I guess we have to load params and settings when required. But other improvements were made already e.g. lazy load in release 5.0.0, site caching for wikibase objects in 3.0.20200111.