It's a parctice that dates back to 2006 when the API was first written, and frankly isn't covered by the coding conventions. Same thing with the docblocks, they're all copypasted with some bits changed and don't even make sense if you look at them in the genereated code docs.
I don't feel that any of us depend on this anymore (get a better IDE), so in the inerest of consistancy it's time we said goodbye to it.
"I wouldn't object to stylizing the API code to bring it in line with
the rest of MW on principle, but I'm not gonna bother myself." --Roan
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/60657#c5108>
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* Like the JSON formatter, use our own WDDX formatter when PHP's is not available or the user asked for pretty output (PHP's doesn't do indentation)
* Don't prettify when our own formatter is used because PHP's is not avaiable
* Detect regular arrays (with sequential integer keys) and use <array> for them, rather than using <struct> for all arrays. PHP's formatter does this as well. This change should make our WDDX formatter's output identical to PHP's
Doxygen documentation update:
* Changed alls @addtogroup to @ingroup. @addtogroup adds the comment to the group description, but doesn't add the file, class, function, ... to the group like @ingroup does. See for example http://svn.wikimedia.org/doc/group__SpecialPage.html where it's impossible to see related files, classes, ... that should belong to that group.
* Added @file to file description, it seems that it should be explicitely decalred for file descriptions, otherwise doxygen will think that the comment document the first class, variabled, function, ... that is in that file.
* Removed some empty comments
* Removed some ?>
Added following groups:
* ExternalStorage
* JobQueue
* MaintenanceLanguage
One more thing: there are still a lot of warnings when generating the doc.
* Add @addtogroup tags to various classes, to try and group conceptually-related classes together.
* Add brief descriptions to various Special pages, thanks to Phil Boswell.
* Moving some docs to be right above the classes they represent, so that they are picked up.