Two steps forward, one step back for mwbot-rs

I was intending to write a pretty different blog post about progress on mwbot-rs but...ugh. The main dependency of the parsoid crate, kuchiki, was archived over the weekend. In reality it's been lightly/un-maintained for a while now, so this is just reflecting reality, but it does feel like a huge setback. Of course, I only have gratitude for Simon Sapin, the primary author and maintainer, for starting the project in the first place.

kuchiki was a crate that let you manipulate HTML as a tree, with various ways of iterating over and selecting specific DOM nodes. parsoid was really just a wrapper around that, allowing you get to get a WikiLink node instead of a plain <a> tag node. Each "WikiNode" wrapped a kuchiki::NodeRef for convenient accessors/mutators, but still allowed you to get at the underlying node via Deref, so you could manipulate the HTML directly even if the parsoid crate didn't know about/support something yet.

This is not an emergency by any means, kuchiki is pretty stable, so in the short-term we'll be fine, but we do need to find something else and rewrite parsoid on top of that. Filed T327593 for that.

I am mostly disappointed because have cool things in the pipeline that I wanted to focus on instead. The new toolforge-tunnel CLI is probably ready for a general announcement and was largely worked on by MilkyDefer. And I also have upload support mostly done, I'm just trying to see if I can avoid a breaking change in the underlying mwapi_errors crate.

In short: ugh.