Deprecated Library Functions / Methods

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sun Dec 2 18:03:22 PST 2012


On Monday, December 03, 2012 02:58:57 Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Monday, 3 December 2012 at 00:52:55 UTC, Joshua Niehus wrote:
> >> I don't like leaving clutter in code, and in this case, I
> >> think that it's safe and reasonable to clean up that clutter.
> >> 
> >> - Jonathan M Davis
> > 
> > +1
> 
> -1. There's really no harm in leaving it there. On my hard drive,
> I have somewhere in the ballpark of a gigabyte of code saved
> (includes random apps I've compiled over the years).
> 
> I don't know what most of it is, and I don't really care. If I
> need it, its there, and if not, whatever, there's not much, if
> anything, of a downside to having crap saved. My hard drive is
> still 75% free, access to the files I want is as fast as ever,
> and so on.
> 
> With deprecated alias.... if you don't use it, whatever. With old
> code, if you don't use it.... you won't even notice its there.
> 
> The only real downside I can think of is making the full download
> a bit slower. I don't think this is important. zipped code is
> small code. Besides, with the real world "problem" today, what
> are we even talking about? 50 kilobytes? Big deal.

It's messy and ugly to leave dead code around in a library. It also makes it 
so that it's possible for people to keep writing code which uses it when they 
shouldn't be.

I'm all for moving to a model where we keep deprecated stuff around for stuff 
that we deprecate in the future, but I'm completely against leaving the stuff 
that we currently have deprecated around. It was changed in an effort to clean 
up the library in preparation for having a clean, stable API, and leaving it 
around is messy and counter to that purpose.

- Jonathan M Davis


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