Deprecation schedule

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday 26 November 2010 15:19:37 Jason House wrote:
> T2 - This should be quite long. There's no
> reason to leave active projects with a non-compiling code base just
> because an API in a low priority area has changed. I would say something
> like 6-12 months. What do other languages do?

Java marks stuff as deprecated and then _never_ removes it. It makes the 
deprecation a bit of a joke really. Many people continue to use the deprecated 
stuff anyway. A prime example would be that they deprecated Date's most useful 
constructors in an effort to make you use the Calendar stuff. People keep on using 
those constructors anyway, because they don't care about the Calendar stuff, and 
it's a lot more of a pain to use. As far as I know, Sun has _never_ actually 
removed a deprecated function from Java's standard library (and if they haven't 
before, now they never will since they were eaten by Oracle - who knows what 
Oracle will do).

Certainly, whatever we do, we don't want to follow Java's route. Hopefully there 
are other languages out there which handle deprecation better. Since I've mostly 
been a C++ and Java guy though, I'm not at all familiar with how other languages 
deal with it. Python would probably be a good place to look though, since they 
generally seem to be pretty organized.

- Jonathan M Davis