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. I know of many bot-operators and developers that ported their scripts to the core branch. When I (Ricordisamoa) switched to 'core' (not much after that I started developing my bot, actually) I felt at first confused – also because of the annoying lack of documentation, for both core and compat – but then I understood that the old version was much more messy.

Problem
I am working on several bugfixes for core, along with a couple major changes (support for Flow and editing of multiple Wikibase claims at once) but I know that no one will take care of backporting them to compat. MediaWiki and its extensions are evolving fast, and we cannot keep two different bot frameworks up-to-date. Also, the documentation does not always tell them apart, and this is raising issues with less-experienced operators.

Some others are also working to make the framework compatible with Python 3 (58053), and again: why two versions?

Proposal
Now, I am proposing to declare 'compat' officially deprecated in favor of 'core' and give notice of this on pywikipedia-l and pywikipedia-announce. Of course, we will have to solve 55880 before. We could even port some of the screen-scraping techniques to core, if API access is a problem for someone. But we should definitely keep them in a separate file.

Comments

 * I'm definitely I favor of deprecating compat but at first we need to make a to-do list and see what needs to be done, You know there are lots of thing needs to be done about this deprecation that I think we need to make a separate page and talk about them at first. things like documentation about migrating self-written codes, documentation for bot operators, porting remained scripts, etc. Ladsgroup (talk) 18:55, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I agree, we need to do a work breakdown of what needs to be done before deprecating compat. Multichill (talk) 19:00, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
 * how about Manual:Pywikibot/2.0 and subpages? -- Ricordi  samoa  01:18, 2 May 2014 (UTC)
 * As a EN.WP bot editor when I started writing bots I looked at the established python framework for Wikipeida bots. I then tried to figure out what the difference was between compat and rewrite.  Looking at the scripts that were available I determined the compat was the better choice.  I express my vote against deprecating compat until all compat scripts ported over to rewrite, a migration guide is built, and documentation/examples are  sufficient for the entirety of the classes/methods. Hasteur (talk) 00:38, 4 May 2014 (UTC)