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Re: Deprecate vs. discourage
From: |
Greg Troxel |
Subject: |
Re: Deprecate vs. discourage |
Date: |
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:41:37 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.110011 (No Gnus v0.11) Emacs/23.1 (berkeley-unix) |
address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> I think things like ‘uniform-vector-read’ should be discouraged rather
> than deprecated, since it matches the definition in ‘discouraged.h’:
>
> A discouraged feature is one that shouldn't be used in new code
> since we have a better alternative now. However, there is nothing
> wrong with using the old feature, so it is OK to continue to use
> it.
>
> However, discouraged features currently don’t produce any sort of
> warning. I would suggest using the same technique as
> ‘build-aux/link-warning.h’ to issue a link-time warning.
>
> What do you think?
Given the history of guile, I suspect that in some number of years a
feature that has been discouraged will get moved to deprecated, and then
removed. So the question is really what kind of commitment there is to
API/ABI stability, and I don't think there is much.
The key question is whether we mean:
This feature exists and is the currently-known best way.
This feature exists and we have no plan to withdraw it, but there's a
better way. [and implicitly, the odds of us later deciding to remove
it are significantly higher than the previous category]
This feature still exists, and there is a better way. We're going to
remove this feature in a future release, so you had really better fix
your code not to use it.
I think discouraged is the second one.
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