[Xapian-discuss] Deprecation policy question

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 03:32:04PM +0100, Richard Boulton wrote:
> Except that in 
> option 2 we document the features as deprecated straight away.  We 
> could, of course, instead document them as "to be deprecated at next 
> minor release" (which might best be done simply by adding a bug report 
> for them, and tagging the bug as a blocker for the next minor release). 
>  But, if it's just documentation, and not causing compiler warnings or 
> anything, it seems silly to make a distinction between "will be 
> deprecated" and "is deprecated".

It seems to me that delaying deprecation (with or without a warning)
is unhelpful to API users.  It means that new code will get written
which uses already doomed features, thus creating more work for users.

> (I've been going round in circles with my thinking on this, which is why 
> I posted to the list.  I'm currently tending towards option #1, for 
> reference - making it obvious to users as soon as possible that they're 
> going to have to change their code in a particular way after a future 
> release seems worth breaking the builds of a hypothetical few users who 
> use -Werror or equivalent.)

I think this is probably the best too.

Cheers,
    Olly