Moved here from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Deprecate_pywikibot-compat
=Background=
Currently, the Pywikibot framework is split in two branches: 'core' (formerly 'rewrite') has full API support and is much more up-to-date with new MediaWiki features, while 'compat' (formerly 'trunk') is old and largely based on screen-scraping.
'compat' currently gets no new features, and bug fixes are implemented very slowly. This means compat effectively is deprecated already, but this has not been explicitly pointed out to the community.
=Problem=
There are several issues with this status quo:
* Documentation is partially still compat-based, confusing newcomers
* Even worse, some newcomers start with compat because of that
* Bug fixes are expected when compat breaks
All in all, many wasted man hours that could have been used more effectively.
=Goal=
Defining the long-term deprecation status for compat, and communicating this to the community.
= What do we mean with 'deprecation'?=
* Code:
* Do 'we' no longer provide new features?
* No general bug fixes, but still some important ones (e.g. api access broken)?
* No bug fixes at all?
* Do we still accept 3rd party bug fixes?
* Documentation:
* Just mark documentation as deprecated?
* Move it?
* Remove it?
* Warning for users they should migrate?
== Deprecation does *not* mean: ==
* Actively preventing compat users from using compat
= Blocking issues =
Before we can deprecate compat, these issues *must* be solved:
* ...
= Open questions =
* How do we define deprecation? (see above)
* What to do with the large set of scripts that have not been migrated.
= Blocking issues =
There is a list of potentially useful things at {T57880}, but none of them look blocking to me.
= Timeframe =
* April 2014: original RFC
* May 2015: moved to Phabricator
* mid May 2015: Hackathon discussions on the following subjects:
* ...