Re: Upcoming platform deprecations

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

> On 10/10/05, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
>
>> > Agreed; having to learn on IRC by word of mouth to "not use X; it's
>> > broken"
>>
>> These things continue to work about as well as they ever did.
>
> Yes--they continue to possibly do just as much harm as good, IMO.
> Lots of people don't get the message and thus continue using
> suboptimal stuff anyway, and when someone does learns that X is "bad",
> they wonder if other modules are also bad unless they can find some
> official place that mentions what is actually intended.
>
>> > or to "not use X because it will be replaced by something sane
>> > in the future" is not cool.  It's part of what Brian's been
>> > complaining about.  Obviously, we need to pick our wording carefully,
>> > but we need to communicate intentions somehow.
>>
>> The only reason to not use something because it'll be replaced
>> real-soon-now is "because I want to use the cool new stuff that all the
>> cool kids are using". But API/ABI stability is about what's safe and
>> stable and boring, not about what's cool. ISVs don't want to keep
>> re-porting to this year's cool API - they just want to use an ABI that
>> will keep working. And they get frightened at the slightest suggestion
>> that it won't keep working.
>
> Yes, that's true.  But this thread really isn't about making stuff
> stop working (I hope!), just about deprecation

Yes, my point is just that and
imminent-deprecation-without-official-replacement announcement scares
people more than a deprecation-with-official-replacement. And the
slightest bit of doubt makes the API useless, so you've effectively
deprecated it without a replacement.

I've stated my objection and I'll leave it at that.

> (gnome 1.x stuff still
> works and gnucash still uses it).  Also, we've never really told ISVs
> what we think they should use.  There's been quite a few times that we
> (meaning "various Gnome hackers") have told people that certain
> modules in the platform weren't cool and should probably be avoided by
> ISVs and others, and we even had libgnomeprint dropped from the
> platform from 2.0.x->2.2.x (and then accidentally get released as part
> of the platform on the ftp site through 2.11 or so).
>
> It'd be nice if we didn't have to deprecate stuff.

I like deprecation. It's orderly progress.

>  It'd be nice if
> everything had super solid support like gtk+.  But, given that it
> doesn't, isn't it best to communicate intentions and our feel of the
> state of the modules (though of course, making sure that we don't
> break stuff and do maintain the API/ABI stability promise)?  Isn't
> that what Brian has been harping about all along?

I'm not sure yet quite what Brian wants.

Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com