Deprecation policy

[Daniel Murphy via Digitalmars-d]

On 4/02/2016 6:25 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>
> With regards to language features, we really don't have a policy. Some
> stuff has been in the state of "we're definitely going to deprecate it"
> for ages (e.g. delete and using scope on local variables) but never
> actually gets deprecated, and other stuff gets deprecated but doesn't
> get removed for ages. And I think that it mostly comes down to when a
> compiler dev feels like making the change (and they usually don't -
> probably because they have much more interesting and pressing things to
> worry about).
>

There are other things holding up deprecated features other than lack of 
time/energy.

- Walter/Andrei have declared features deprecated for ideological 
reasons, yet they're still useful and don't have good alternatives.
- Walter/Andrei have refused or extended reasonable deprecation paths 
because they will break code

So implementing a deprecation typically means five minutes of writing a 
compiler patch, an hour of removing ancient uses from obscure druntime 
code, 12 months of waiting for review and 3 weeks of arguing with Walter 
and/or Andrei and/or anyone else who can't be bothered updating their code.

See https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4733 for why I don't bother 
any more.