Deprecation (was: Refactoring Browser (was: About KCPandautomatic initialize))

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Tue Sep 16 18:17:14 UTC 2003


On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, ducasse wrote:

> Hi julian
>
> The idea of the notification the way it is is to really warns the
> people in annoying manner.
> Now do not tell us that you cannot simply just change the method into
> Object, to do what you want
> :)

I'm with Julian on this - the question is, annoying to whom?
Who you *want* to be annoying are the people that are developing, say, the
Refactoring Browser.  But they're savvy enough that they've probably
already gone in and edited that method on Object.  So who you end up
annoying are the newbies who try to load the RB, and are getting
deprecation notifications constantly which makes the RB unusable.  They
have no idea they could fix it by changing that method on Object (and
certainly wouldn't dare to even if they tracked the warnings to that
spot).

It's very useful to have *a mode* you can test your code in that will warn
you of any usage of deprecated methods; this allows you as a developer to
check whether your package needs to be updated after every release or so.

But to have that mode be the default, and to have there be no easy way
(for newbies) to even turn it off, basically amounts to having removed the
methods with no warning - it defeats the purpose of "deprecation", which
is that old code still works even as you're phasing a method out.




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