Manual:Pywikibot/2.0

Pywikipediabot 2.0 aka "rewrite" was proposed in 2007, but has never been ready to replace the current "trunk" version. This is a list of things that we should do to get it ready.

Goals

 * Be ready to merge at the end of Summer 2013.
 * Provide a seamless transition for bot operators and writers.
 * Make it easier to make raw API calls.
 * Proper distinction between programs (give output and user interaction) and libraries

To be done

 * Many site methods not yet implemented.
 * All trunk scripts should be converted over. (/Porting status)
 * Create a script called  to provide a compatibility layer.
 * Some programs need to be split into a program and library part (for example upload.py)
 * login.py has some weird quirks that need to be looked into (hack workaround at /login.py, maybe this has to do with the path itself?)
 * Move api.update_page to a method of the page class
 * i18n.translate fallback flag default is different in core
 * Find a way to cache tokens between login sessions.
 * Documentation, documentation, documentation!

Ideas
--Yurik (talk) 06:13, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Content+Site model is needed. The current structure of pywiki centers around a "page" object. This object is both the container of data, plus the networking code. It allows someone to write page.content to get the page markup from a site, which might be somewhat convenient, yet it promotes non-batched usage which is much heavier on wiki. Instead, page object should be a local-only container of data and related (parsing) code, whereas all network access should be done by the Site object. Syntax might be different, but the concepts should stay:
 * as part of T101587, this feature request needs to be added as a Phabricator task. However as you mentioned something like this at Lyon, and it has been over two years since you wrote this, a recap and reply is probably in order.
 * Pywikipedia and Pywikibot 2 have very strong batching concepts which preload props (See APISite.preloadpages), though Pywikipedia is such a terrible mess that the good stuff in it is usually only known and used by the initial coder. We have patches pending for Pywikibot 2 to vastly improve preloading/batching, however a few huge bugs need to be fixed first.  But, the design is OK and the direction almost certainly matches what your wanting here.
 * Where Pywikibot 2 doesnt match your design is the last step: page1.templates raising an error if 'templates' was not batched. Pywikibot 2 will recognise that the templates were not preloaded during the batch operation, and will proceed to fetch them.  I think I can safely say that Pywikibot 2 (and even 3, and probably never) are not going to raise an exception on a Page operation because the caller didnt batch them properly in advance.  The first reason is, as you say, the Page-centric model is convenient.  Also backwards compatibility.  And finally, the script writer may know what they are doing: it may be that only one page out of 100 needs to call .templates, and preloading templates that would be less efficient.
 * However I see two approaches we can take to promote and even enforce batch centric programming.
 * issue a warning if page1.templates is called and the data wasnt preloaded
 * add a 'batch only mode' which does raise an exception
 * John Vandenberg (talk) 00:48, 6 June 2015 (UTC)