deprecate deprecated?

[monarch_dodra]

On Sunday, 11 November 2012 at 21:14:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> Agreed. Otherwise, you can't deprecate something without 
> immediately breaking
> code, which means that if you're trying to never immediately 
> break people's
> code when making a change (which is the position that Phobos is 
> in), then you
> can't use deprecated.
>
> [SNIP]
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

The problem with this approach is that the step after marking 
something deprecated is removing the function. So people using 
something deprecated go from
- "warning: Don't use this" (yeah... whatever...)
- "Your function has disappeared". (Oh oh)

At this point, they're fucked bad because they can't even bypass 
the problem with an extra -d command line option, which (in my 
eyes) is "pretty please, I'll change it, just give me a bit more 
time".

IMO, there *NEEDS* to be some way of saying
- "this _will_ be deprecated soon (marked for deprecation), you 
should consider migrating to something else. here is you warning."
and
- "This is already deprecated. Here is your error. You can 
*still* use it with -d, but migrate away soon, because this 
function is about to disappear"

----
If you can't make this distinction, then you also run into the 
danger of not breaking anybody's code when deprecating stuff, but 
having to keep deprecated stuff around forever.