[phobos] Deprecation of std.date

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday 16 January 2011 09:46:57 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> One possibility would be to have the legacy functions taking a d_time
> simply take a long for now (d_time was an alias for it I recall). Then
> you don't need to import std.date, and the warnings are gone.

I can do that. The problem is that then you don't get any messages when you use 
those functions, so when they get deprecated, it comes out of nowhere for you 
unless you've read the documentation or you've been using other d_time stuff and 
remembered that those functions take d_time. One suggestion that someone sent me 
was to temporarily templatize the function so that the pragma could be put 
inside the function as was done in some of the std.algorithm functions, but that 
_is_ a bit of a hack. I may have to do it that way though.

As I mentioned before, what we really need is a version of deprecated that is 
used to indicate that something is scheduled for deprecation rather than 
actually deprecated. And, of course - as I believe you've suggested in the past 
- being able to give deprecated the deprecation message would be a definite 
improvement as well. As it is, we need the pragma both when the symbol is 
scheduled to be deprcecated and after it's been deprecated (in addition to 
having actually marked it as deprecated), or the programmer doesn't know what to 
use instead, and the pragma isn't precise enough to avoid extraneous pragma 
messages.

- Jonathan M Davis