(bug 6835): Removing the includes/Parser.php::getTemplateArgs() function, because it seems to be unused:
* Nobody on #mediawiki seems to definitively know of anything that uses it.
* A "grep -inr getTemplateArgs" shows that there seem to be no calls to it in MediaWiki or the extensions in SVN.
* A google codesearch ( http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=getTemplateArgs&btnG=Search+Code ) seems to show no out-of-tree usage.
* A straight google showed nothing obvious.
* An "svn blame includes/Parser.php" shows that it was added in r4452 (2 years 2 months ago) and has hardly been touched since.
* A "php parserTests.php --quiet --quick --color=no" shows no new regressions when it's removed.
* Using a code coverage tool I simply could not get this function to be invoked.
* Nobody requested this be kept when removing it was first suggested on wikitech-l three months ago (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-July/036969.html ).
* A PHPXref output for MW 1.6.3 ( http://mediawiki.openapp.org/mediawiki/nav.html?_functions/index.html ) showed zero references to this function.
In short, it looks like dead code, and seeing as this is the very start of the 1.9 cycle, now is probably the ideal time to remove it, so as to give a maximum window of opportunity for complaints in case it turns out someone somewhere is actually using this.
Also purging the RELEASE-NOTES of stuff from the 1.8 series, since the RELEASE-NOTES need to be updated anyway for this.