Phobos - breaking existing code

[Dicebot via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 28 November 2014 at 23:33:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Just for fun, I've decided to try and get MicroEmacs in D added 
> to the dub registry. The last time it compiled was 2 years ago.
>
> I wound up with at least a dozen references to Phobos names 
> that have disappeared. No corrective action was indicated, just 
> "undefined symbol". I have to go refigure out what the code was 
> trying to do, and go poking through the Phobos documentation to 
> see what will work today.
>
> I know there's been a lot of "break my code" advocacy lately, 
> but this code was only 2 years old.
>
> I fully understand how unfriendly this is to users and how 
> discouraging it can be to have their recently working code 
> shattered and scattered. We need to do a lot better.

We have deprecation cycle of one year. Expecting unmaintained 
application to compile after 2 years has passed is completely 
unreasonable.

Almost every single D program out there breaks with _each_ DMD 
release, Phobos deprecations are least of all evils there. Try 
fixing that before complaining about #breakmycode

Also it feels like you consider D at stable version. It isn't. 
There is a huge amount of work to be done before it can be 
considered even honest 1.0.0 - doing something with scope, 
finishing @nogc / rc attempts, cleaning up qualifier mess etc. 
Once it is all done, maybe (maybe!) we can talk about stability.

Right now it is a fallacy.