[phobos] Why "Scheduled for deprecation?"

[Walter Bright]

Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday 14 January 2011 23:57:05 Walter Bright wrote:
>   
>> Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>     
>>> I'm wondering what the point of marking modules as scheduled for
>>> deprecation really is - at least the way that we've been doing it. I can
>>> understand marking a module as scheduled for deprecation if there's a
>>> planned replacement but no actual replacement yet in order to warn
>>> programmers that that module will be going away. However, at present, we
>>> seem to be using it to just tell programmers to use a replacement which
>>> actually does exist. That being the case, why are we marking them as
>>> scheduled for deprecation rather than just deprecating them? Having the
>>> pragma tell people what to use instead is certainly good, but I don't
>>> quite get why we've been marking modules as scheduled to be deprecated
>>> when we have a clear replacement for them and are telling programmers to
>>> use the replacement. Why aren't we actually deprecating them and then
>>> just using the pragma to indicate which module to use instead?
>>>       
>> Because it allows users to update their code on their own schedule,
>> rather than ours. It's very annoying to have your builds break for
>> reason X when you are hard at work developing Y.
>>     
>
> True, but isn't that what -d is for?
>
>   

Deprecation is a multi-stage process. I don't want to make them change 
their makefiles without warning.