(git HEAD) std.datetime spewing deprecation messages

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, 03 Jun 2014 18:35:31 +0100
Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2014-06-03 at 10:00 -0700, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d
> wrote:
> > On Tue, 3 Jun 2014 07:21:12 -0700
> > "H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d" <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> >
> > > https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12846
> > >
> > > Since when is x.hours, x.minutes, etc., deprecated?
> >
> > As of Sunday. The problem is that they seem to be very prone for
> > misuse.
>
> I think x.hours and x.minutes are fine per se. I would suggest deeper
> investigation of the perceived problems rather than just deprecate
> then remove.
>
> > Not only do they not match what TickDuration uses those same names
> > for (it uses them for the equivelent of total!"hours"(), etc.
> > rather than get!"hours"(), etc.), which has come up a number of
> > times before, but what I've found at work (where we have a C++ port
> > of Duration) is that pretty much everyone keeps using get when they
> > meant total, consistently causing subtle bugs. So, I've come to the
> > conclusion that the current design is just too bug-prone, and by
> > deprecating the individual getters and renaming get to getOnly, I
> > hope that that will seriously reduce the risk of misuse.
>
> This all sounds like implementation detail rather than API usage. I
> admit not having used this stuff in D, but the same basic system
> exists in Groovy and it works just fine.

The problem is that folks assume that they know what the functions do, and
they consistently seem to assume incorrectly. I would have thought that having
the documentation be clear would have been sufficient, but it hasn't been,
because too many people don't read it, or they read it and then don't remember
it correctly later. And since getting the individual units of a Duration
rather than the total is likely to be a relatively rare operation, I think
that having the individual getters for extracting the individual units is just
begging for trouble. I fully expect that the vast majority of users who will
end up with deprecation warnings due to these changes will have found a bug in
their code.

- Jonathan M Davis