On 2010-11-27 00:44, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Friday 26 November 2010 15:19:37 Jason House wrote:
T2 - This should be quite long. There's no
reason to leave active projects with a non-compiling code base just
because an API in a low priority area has changed. I would say something
like 6-12 months. What do other languages do?
Java marks stuff as deprecated and then _never_ removes it. It makes the
deprecation a bit of a joke really. Many people continue to use the deprecated
stuff anyway. A prime example would be that they deprecated Date's most useful
constructors in an effort to make you use the Calendar stuff. People keep on
using
those constructors anyway, because they don't care about the Calendar stuff, and
it's a lot more of a pain to use. As far as I know, Sun has _never_ actually
removed a deprecated function from Java's standard library (and if they haven't
before, now they never will since they were eaten by Oracle - who knows what
Oracle will do).
Certainly, whatever we do, we don't want to follow Java's route. Hopefully there
are other languages out there which handle deprecation better. Since I've mostly
been a C++ and Java guy though, I'm not at all familiar with how other languages
deal with it. Python would probably be a good place to look though, since they
generally seem to be pretty organized.
- Jonathan M Davis
It seems like that developers using Java are very afraid of removing
anything. If I recall correctly the SWT library contains several
classes/interfaces with a 2 appended to the end of the name just because
they don't want to remove the old class/interface.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
