[Xapian-discuss] Deprecation policy question

[Richard Boulton]

Jean-Francois Dockes wrote:
> If this contract is not respected, the distinction between revision and
> minor release becomes less useful, it's a question of confidence.
> 
> If you add the macro on a revision change, the compilation will fail for
> people who use -Werror (not my case by the way). Contract broken.

Of course, we could just specify that the "contract" is that we'll not 
break compilation as long as you either don't specify -Werror, or 
specify -Wno-deprecated.

What I'm really wondering is how many (if any) xapian users actually 
compile with -Werror, and would thus end up with broken builds in this 
case.  And also, whether such users are compiling this way because they 
want to get the latest warnings, and would appreciate their build 
breaking in this situation.

> By adding the warning on the minor release change, people still have a full
> release cycle to adapt, and nothing unexpected happens if things break
> (things *are* expected to break on release changes).
> 
> It just feels cleaner to me this way, but take it lightly: I do understand
> that we didn't sign any contract :) , and I don't feel extremely strongly
> either way.

Thanks for your input.

-- 
Richard