Re: deprecation?

["Vincent Untz" <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

On Mon, October 10, 2005 17:32, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Bill Haneman">
>> In the real world that means "we are probably going to break this stuff
>> by accident, so don't come crying when we do".  That is not acceptable
>> in conjunction with an ABI stability guarantee.  "We will keep it around
>> even when it breaks" is not a very reassuring "guarantee".  If bugs
>> against deprecated API get closed as WONTFIX or OBSOLETE (as they do!)
>> then deprecation is not an acceptable path for such ABI in a stable
>> release series (i.e. gnome 2.X).
>
> This is all wrong. For a start, we're not deprecating them just yet, we're
> making it clear that we will. When we deprecate them, they will continue
> to be API/ABI stable. When we finally drop them, we will not care about
> them at all (that is when the word 'support' comes into play, and not
> before).

I think it's totally okay to say "we're doing our best to replace them
and we'll deprecate them in the future, so please don't use it".

They'll stay API/ABI stable when they'll be deprecated, sure. But the big
problem is that if someone finds a huge bug in one of these deprecated
libraries, then should the bug be fixed (even if it requires a huge amount
of work) or not? While I'd really prefer to say OBSOLETE/WONTFIX, the
libraries are still in the platform and bugs should be fixed (unless
we're going from 2.x to 3.x ;-)).

It's just a problem of wording: "they may continue to be supported as
individual projects" is not good since we should continue to support
them during 2.x.

Yes, I hate this. I don't even want to look at the code of some of
these libraries. But they're part of a stable platform.

If we really want to not support them, we should start a 3.0 platform.
(I've been thinking for some time that having different life cycles for
the desktop and the platform/bindings could make sense, but that's a
different story).

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.