phobos breakage... why?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, July 25, 2012 19:36:27 dnewbie wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 July 2012 at 17:24:06 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> > I was just playing with the beta, and got this among the
> > sea of errors:
> > 
> > arsd/cgi.d(898): Error: function std.algorithm.indexOf!("a ==
> > b",ubyte[],string).indexOf is deprecated
> > 
> > 
> > Why was that taken out? If you ask me, the root cause of D's
> > perceived stability problem has little to do with bugs. It
> > is 95% phobos devs removing functionality at random. Why do we
> > keep doing this?
> 
> One of my programs stopped working in 2.060. It is *really*
> annoying when I see the message 'X is deprecated'.

If it makes you feel any better, the number of things getting deprecated has 
gone down considerably. Almost all of the changes related to deprecations in 
2.060 are deprecated items being removed, not stuff being scheduled for 
deprecation or stuff being deprecated.  Everything that was deprecated has been 
scheduled for deprecation and marked as such for _at least_ 6 months. _Most_ 
of it is stuff that was scheduled for deprecation a long time ago (years ago in 
some cases) but never actually deprecated (though it looks like some of that 
is missing from the changelog; I'll need to add it). I made an effort to clean 
up that stuff and got a good chunk of it taken care of for 2.060 (though 
unfortunately, not all of it). And with that taken care of and the number of 
items being scheduled for deprecation having been dropping off considerably, we 
should be approaching the point where only rare items get deprecated if even 
that.

So, yes deprecations are annoying, and we were doing quite a few for a while 
as we cleaned a number of things up that needed cleaning up (a number of which 
were clamored for by those in the newsgroup - e.g. making the names of Phobos, 
functions consistent), but it's been tailing off and is approaching the point 
where it will be rare.

- Jonathan M Davis