Re: Announcing: Project Ridley

[BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne gmail com>]

> > > I don't really see much reason ever to break ABI for the forseeable
> > > future.  There's essentially nothing stopping us from simply leaving
> > > deprecated functions in there indefinitely, other than a fairly minor
> > > memory footprint increase which will never be paged in anyway.
> >
> > If they are to remain forever then they aren't really deprecated.
> 
> Sure they are. Deprecated just means "don't use these in new projects, and
> migrate away from them because at some stage they're going to break". When
> we talk about leaving them in there "indefinitely", it just means we don't
> really have an urge or interest in doing an ABI break quite so soon. Having
> a healthy, longish deprecation period for these big chunks is a good thing!

Maybe. But I think that the urge of developers to migrate away from
deprecated libraries is inversely proprtional to the threat of the ABI
breaking. Like pulling away a plaster, either you do it slowly or you
do it quick but the amount of pain is still the same. For users it is
good I guess. For devs it is annoying to have to learn two APIs
because so much code still use deprecated stuff.

-- 
mvh Björn