@deprecated

[Stuart Ballard]

Looking at the current japi results (which once again blew my mind
with the sheer magnitude of the improvement) I noticed that quite a
lot of (minor) errors are of the form 'deprecated in jdk1x, but not
deprecated in classpath'. It occurred to me that with the output from
japicompat, a copy of the classpath sources and a little perl, it
might be possible to come up with a script that can automatically add
"@deprecated" in the appropriate place on any such class or member,
hence getting an almost instant 0.3% improvement in japi scores which
incidentally would push us over 90% of 1.4, which is a nice little
psychological milestone :)

The downside of such a script would be that, at least if done naively,
none of the @deprecated tags would get any comments indicating *why*
the item is deprecated or what should be used instead.

So I'm interested in feedback on whether it's worthwhile to write a
script to add these @deprecated tags or not; basically, is an empty
deprecated tag better or worse than no deprecated tag at all on
something that is deprecated in the JDK?

Another approach I could take is to write the script in a form that's
partly interactive, and perhaps brings up Sun's documentation for each
deprecated member so that the human running the script can use it as
reference in writing deprecation messages for that member in
classpath...

Thoughts?

Stuart.
-- 
http://sab39.dev.netreach.com/