Re: test failures with current mercurial sources (was Re: 3.0.1 release?)

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Apr-2008, David Bateman wrote:

| John W. Eaton wrote:
| > I've added spkron.m and issuperuser.m to the SOURCES lists in the
| > appropriate Makefile.in files in the default branch, but I don't see
| > how that can be the solution if you are building from the hg archive.
| > It would prevent the files from being placed in a distribution tar
| > file though...
| >   
| As all of the sparse dispatched functions are gone, should we created
| deprecated functions from them as well? That is spmax, spmin, splu,
| spqr, spchol, etc, etc. There are at least 20 of them..

Yes, I think it would be good to do this.

We currently have 86 functions in the scripts/deprecated directory.
How long should we leave a function there, and when would it be
reasonable to remove it?  I think 2 releases is long enough.  After
that, we would tell people to change their code.  For this to work
without surprising people too much, I think all the deprecated
functions should include a warning like this

  warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
           "OLD-FCN is obsolete and will be removed from Octave VERSION; please 
use NEW-FCN instead");

before doing the real work of the function.  Then at each release we
should review the deprecated directory and remove the obsolete
functions.

Does that sound OK?

jwe