On Friday, 28 November 2014 at 23:33:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Just for fun, I've decided to try and get MicroEmacs in D added
to the dub registry. The last time it compiled was 2 years ago.
I wound up with at least a dozen references to Phobos names
that have disappeared. No corrective action was indicated, just
"undefined symbol". I have to go refigure out what the code was
trying to do, and go poking through the Phobos documentation to
see what will work today.
I know there's been a lot of "break my code" advocacy lately,
but this code was only 2 years old.
I fully understand how unfriendly this is to users and how
discouraging it can be to have their recently working code
shattered and scattered. We need to do a lot better.
I've just made xmlp (http://www.dsource.org/projects/xmlp)
compile with the newest version of D. It wasn't that bad, despite
xmlp rotting for two years with merge markers left in it. However
what would have made this even easier, would be
a) a summary for each release called "How this version breaks
your code and how to fix it". Don't need that for library
changes, language changes are enough.
b) easy access to older versions of the documentation. When you
have a deprecated and subsequently removed function, you should
at least be able to lookup what the code was supposed to do.
