std.string import cleanup: how to fix regression?

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

Recently, Ilya has been helping to clean up import dependencies between
Phobos module. In the course of cleaning up std.string, a few public
imports were removed because they were not referenced by the module
itself. However, this caused a regression:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13717

The code that got removed was:

------
//Remove when repeat is finally removed. They're only here as part of the
//deprecation of these functions in std.string.
public import std.algorithm : startsWith, endsWith, cmp, count;
public import std.array : join, split;
------

>From the comment, it seems clear that the intent is to move these
functions out of std.string into std.algorithm and std.array. However,
there is currently no way to deprecate public imports, so we can't get
rid of this dependency without breaking user code (one of my projects
already doesn't compile because of this).

What should we do? Anybody has a good idea for getting rid of the
gratuitous dependency on std.algorithm / std.array without breaking user
code with no warning?


T

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