Demi Marie Obenour <[email protected]> writes: >On 10/15/25 22:18, Douglas Bagnall wrote: >> Anyway, the summary is the Samba 3/4 history has left us with >> unmaintained pockets within our codebase that we ignore because we >> assume nobody is using them, but which we don't delete because maybe >> somebody is using them. There may not be very many more. > >Would it make sense to announce that they are deprecated, and then remove >them in the next release?
That doesn't work, people don't read and/or ignore the announcement (particularly if it's buried in a three-page shopping list below "patched a flobblenortz bug in the Wombat 68000 port") and then complain in the next release when it vanishes. The process I use is: n: Present. n+1: Warn of deprecation. n+2: #ifdef out n+3: #error inside the #ifdef, "Contact the maintainer if you see this message". n+4: As above. n+5: As above. n+6: Remove code. This assumes there's enough time throughout, so a few years, for everyone to catch up. If you're doing releases every few weeks or months you'll need to spread it out a bit more. Peter.
