Deprecation schedule

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2010-11-27 00:44, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> 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

It seems like that developers using Java are very afraid of removing 
anything. If I recall correctly the SWT library contains several 
classes/interfaces with a 2 appended to the end of the name just because 
they don't want to remove the old class/interface.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg