[OT] Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You

[Mathias LANG]

On Monday, 17 August 2020 at 14:38:54 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> I think we should pay attention to the distinction Steve draws 
> between deprecation in the sense of discouraged but still 
> working, vs. deprecation in the sense of it won't compile until 
> you fix your code. One way to discourage the use of certain 
> deprecated features but still allow old code to work, is to 
> deprecate them, then undocument them, but never remove them.  
> So the old code still compiles and works as before, but the old 
> features are no longer documented and so new code will no 
> longer use them.

Another key difference is that you can opt-out of the 
deprecation, pretty easily. Just don't update your compiler. Or 
your dependencies. We don't remove old versions from the website, 
so if your code compiled with v2.052.0, then it will still 
compile with it today... Unless you're using Mac, in which case 
you will be force to upgrade to a recent version, because Apple.

Another example that I really like is Github. You guys remember 
we renamed the organization name on Github years ago ? Well the 
redirect still works 
(http://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd).