Thread:Talk:Requests for comment/Localisation format/Deprecation schedule/reply

The line of thought is that MediaWiki 1.23 will be a long time support version, which many people will be working with for years. Not deprecating it in 1.23 would most probably extend active deprecation for the majority of 3rd party users to 1.27 (if the 6 month release schedule, and the LTS planning is maintained).

There certainly is a cost in the localisation process keeping backwards compatibility for both MediaWiki core (at translatewiki.net we call it "branch support"), as well as for extensions, in that we need the shim files, and we need to maintain the code in core to process PHP based i18n files. As the work hasn't been done, and I'm not extremely familiar with

Additionally, there will probably be an impact on the (not yet published) RfC about updating ResourceLoader to be able to serve message group files in JSON format to the JavaScript front-end. Keeping PHP based i18n around, may mean that legacy i18n file support would have to be implemented, to remain consistent (although this could of course be explicitly excluded in the future specification).