On 2015-09-12 01:06, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Walter and Andrei publicly agreed at dconf that it should be removed. As
I understand it, it was removed from the documentation with 2.068 (but
not yet deprecated), and now it's been deprecated. Now, that being said,
I think 2.070 is too soon to remove it, because at the rate of releases
that Martin is targeting, that's maybe 6 months as deprecated, which
makes it far too easy IMHO for code to go from working to not compiling
without any warnings in between for someone who's not updating their
compiler frequently. Normally, the deprecation cycle has been
approximately one year as deprecated but documented and approximately
one year as deprecated but undocumented (and then the symbol would be
removed), so code would continue to work as-is for about 2 years once
something has been deprecated, which is about 4x longer than what
std.stream is currently marked for. Now, granted, std.stream has
essentially been marked as scheduled for deprecation for some time now
(embarassingly long really), so in theory, it's not heavily used, but
it's also pretty clear based on newsgroup posts and SO and whatnot that
it _is_ being used on some level in spite of the fact that it's
documentation says that it's going away.
The problem with adding notifications in the documentation is that if a
user already has implemented code that uses the particular model and
have no need to change the code. Or the user already is familiar with
the module there's no reason to read the documentation to see the
notification or to notice the documentation is gone.
It only (hopefully) prevents new users to use the module.
Would it be better to add the deprecation immediately and let be
deprecated for a longer period? Or use something like 'pragam(msg,
"WARNING: deprecated ...")' if someone is using the "-de" flag.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
