Is Override Still Mandatory?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, November 14, 2012 07:59:06 Rob T wrote:
> That's good news. If I were to use the latest pre-release version
> of dmd that was relatively safe, how will I find it, or is it OK
> to use the master branch?

The master branch _is_ the pre-release version. dmd, druntime, and Phobos do 
not really use proper branches at this point (and even if they did, I wouldn't 
expect there to be a branch separate from master prior to a beta). It should 
be reasonably safe to use, but there's no telling how it will affect your code 
differently from the last release. At minimum there are several known 
regressions (which will be fixed prior to the next release), and there may be 
others. Personally, I use master all the time, but I'm one of the Phobos 
developers. It's fine if you use master (it could help us find regressions if 
nothing else), but I wouldn't really advise using it just to be able to use 
the -di flag.

Also, some of us are hoping that the change to deprecated will be reverted in 
favor of making it so that warnings will be the default for using deprecated 
symbols rather than having error be the default. Having -di is nice, but it 
really doesn't fix much. The main problem (at least from the library writer's 
point of view) is that deprecating anything instantly breaks the code of 
anyone using that the now deprecated symbol. -di makes it so that a programmer 
can protect themselves from that, but it still shackles the library writer 
such that they can't deprecate anything if they don't ever want to break 
anyone's code without giving more warning that a note in the changelog or 
documentation.

- Jonathan M Davis