I am raising this, as it is a change between 1.16 and trunk, which has broken my WikiDB extension.
In my extension, I sub-class the IncludableSpecialPage class to create my own WikiDB_SpecialPage class, which my extension's special pages use. This class provides a load of common functionality, used by all my pages.
It also provides a static RegisterSpecialPage() function, which just takes the special page name, and calls SpecialPage::SpecialPage() with all the necessary arguments as, aside from the name, these are the same for all pages.
In trunk, this now raises a 'Call to undefined method' error.
This happened in r71961, where demon removed the old PHP4 style constructors, and replaced them with the PHP5 __construct() method.
In terms of fixing my own extension, I know I can just replace the call to Special::SpecialPage() with parent::__construct(), but my concern is that mine is not the only extension that will be broken by this change.
I'm happy for this to be marked as WONTFIX if there is a fair degree of confidence that not many existing extensions will be broken (i.e. that my use-case is unusual, or that most extensions already use the new style). However I would strongly urge that bw-compatibility be maintained somehow if there are more than a handful of extensions that may be broken by this.
Version: 1.17.x
Severity: normal