Re: Recommended way to handle deprecation?

[Andreas Rottmann <a rottmann gmx at>]

James Henstridge <james daa com au> writes:

> On 31/03/04 22:50, Andreas Rottmann wrote:
>
>>Hi!
>>
>>I wonder what the recommended way to handle deprecated API: to wrap or
>>not to wrap, that's the question here :). How do other bindings handle
>>this and is there a "recommended way"?
>>
> If you remove deprecated interfaces from your binding, then you will
> break programs written against old versions of your binding.  So while
> I can write a C program today and know that it will work with all
> future GTK 2.x releases, if I write it against a language binding that
> doesn't wrap deprecated interfaces, it might break when the next 2.x
> release comes out.
>
> The best option would be to wrap the function, and emit a deprecation
> warning if possible (I know Python and Java can do this, and GCC has
> an extension to do this for C/C++).
>
Guile does this for its own API, so it should be possible to here
too. Thanks for the advice; So I think the rules can be formulated
like this:

1) If you start a new binding of some lib, don't wrap deprectated stuff.

2) If you underlying stuff becomes deprecated, provide it, along with
   a deprecation message, if possible.

Maybe this should be noted in the Binding Rules somewhere.

Andy
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A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion
Q. Why is top posting bad?