Phobos - breaking existing code

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d]

On 29/11/14 16:56, Andrej Mitrovic via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> The fact that you think you're going to get symbol suggestions for 2
> year old code just shows how out of touch you are with the development
> process. We have a deprecation stage, and a removal stage. There's no
> way you're going to get suggestions for missing symbols for code that
> references those symbols which existed 2 years ago.

It's fair to say that 2 years is a long time in recent Phobos development.

However, I don't think Walter's point is about it biting him personally.  The 
question is, what happens if somebody tries to use or resurrect an old D project 
-- how much trouble are they going to have trying to bring it back to life, and 
where they need to update code, how helpful are the tools?  It doesn't reflect 
well on the language or its community if older D code is as unusable as Walter 
describes, and it's particularly problematic where it relates to Phobos, because 
here we have much more scope to deprecate things without ever actually removing 
them.

That said, I don't think this is an argument for freezing things.  I think it's 
an argument for being very clear about what parts of the Phobos API are stable, 
and allowing for the (clearly documented) possibility of change where that may 
be desirable.