Re: removing older deprecated functions

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 11:18 AM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 28-Jan-2010, Dupuis wrote:
>
> | To me, the concern is to still be able to revive old scripts that you didn't
> | use since a long time. If some function has been obsoleted, it should be
> | easy to find what the substitute is. So maybe this obsolete package could
> | contain stubs, i.e. short scripts telling that some function is obsolete and
> | what the replacement is. Eventually, they could be arranged in such a way
> | that the required operation is performed by calling the updated function.
>
> Every one of the deprecated functions has a warning like this:
>
>  persistent warned = false;
>  if (! warned)
>    warned = true;
>    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
>             "weibpdf is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of 
> Octave; please use wblpdf instead");
>  endif
>
> so since 3.0.0 was released, these functions have been warning that
> their use is obsolete, that they will be remove, and what function to
> use instead.
>
> So I'm in favor of removing them.  But if you want to keep them around
> because you think there is still code that uses the old names and that
> you don't think people will want to update, then I think the best
> option is a package of obsolete functions.  But I don't really want to
> maintain that, so if you or someone else wants that, then I hope a
> volunteer will step forward to create and maintain the package.
>

Me too. Besides occupying disk space (which is a minor point), they
sometimes obscure the list of options when using Tab completion. I
think it's OK to remove at least the functions obsoleted already in
3.0.


> We can also add a chapter to the manual with a list of functions that
> have been removed, in what version the function was removed, and what
> the recommended replacement is.
>

Maybe you could even extract this info from the warnings...

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek, PhD
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz