Re: Deprecations

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 09:22 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Would it make sense to mark all of the deprecated API in GLib and GTK+
> with G_GNUC_DEPRECATED, so that people who are not using the
> DISABLE_DEPRECATED macros still get warned that they are using
> deprecated functions?  At the moment it's very black and white, and I
> think deprecation functions need a grey...

I think muddling the deprecation system like this is a mistake.

Say, I'm a developer working on an app that is supposed to work with
GTK+-2.6 and newer, so I develop and compile with GTK+-2.6.

I have a user who takes one of my releases, and compiles it with
GTK+-2.10 ... they get 20 zillion warnings, and will have little
chance of seeing if something *actually* went wrong with the
compilation.

They can't even send me a patch to fix these warnings, because
the facilities that caused the functions to be deprecated may
not exist in GTK+-2.6.

G_GNUC_DEPRECATED is certainly better than what we do know in one
way ... it produces warnings *without* producing miscompilations;
but I don't think there is any real way to take advantage of it
within our current deprecation system without a ton of extra
typing and complexity.

						Owen