Re: Octave's fstat vs. statistics package fstat

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 9:38 PM, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> Now that Octave will warn about package functions that hide core
> functions, anyone who installs the statistics package from Octave
> Forge will get a message about the fstat function from the package
> shadowing Octave's fstat function even though Octave's fstat function
> is deprecated.
>
> In this particular case, maybe we should just remove fstat instead of
> deprecating it and keeping it around for a release cycle.  It was
> likely not used much, and it is trivial to fix code that did use it
> (just call stat instead of fstat).
>
> Or, since I'm not sure it makes sense to get a warning about hiding a
> function that will eventually be removed anyway, should we take a more
> general approach and change Octave to not warn when a deprecated
> fucntion is hidden by some other function in the path?
>

I'm not sure. I'd say that as long as you have that function part of
Octave, the reason to warn is the same even if it's deprecated -
something may be relying on it.
Btw, that warning can be disabled.

I always thought it would be nice to have a way to disable the
deprecated functions entirely (or perhaps even on a per-function
basis). Yes, it is as simple as deleting them, but still that's
awfully manual.