This seems like a generally good idea and is perhaps worth adding to 3.6 
before it's released... I agree that the deprecation pop-ups could be a 
big problem for non-developers.

I wonder if not showing any warnings even in the Transcript as the 
default might be going too far, though.  Maybe the warnings should still 
show up in the Transcript if you're not in fix-deprecation mode?  Or 
maybe we could have a three-way preference with Transcript-warnings as 
the default.  (There's an example of a radio-button preference under the 
halos section of the prefs window.)

I'm just concerned that if there are no warnings at all, package 
developers might not even notice that methods they rely on have been 
deprecated.  Perhaps this isn't a big problem in practice, I'm not sure.

- Doug


Julian Fitzell wrote:

> Ok, fine, I buy it. :)
>
> Julian
>
> Avi Bryant wrote:
>
>> Well, it seems more useful to pop up a debugger so that you can see the
>> full context that the deprecated call was made in, and have access to 
>> the
>> source to change it right there.  Although I find the notifer popping up
>> to be extremely annoying as a user, it's exactly what I would want as a
>> developer trying to fix all my calls to deprecated methods.  Since I see
>> these as two quite distinct modes, a preference makes lots of sense.  
>> And
>> that way when you're not in fix-deprecation mode, you don't get a whole
>> bunch of messages cluttering up your Transcript either.
>>
>> On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Julian Fitzell wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I'm not convinced we really need a preference for this.  It adds more
>>> complexity and I still think you'd end up getting annoyed at other
>>> people's packages' deprecations while trying to solve your own (as
>>> opposed to just ignoring those lines in a transcript).  I think I'd
>>> still vote for just having transcript output, but this enhancement 
>>> would
>>> certainly be better than the status quo.
>>>
>>> avi at beta4.com wrote:
>>>
>>>> from preamble:
>>>>
>>>> "Change Set:        DeprecationPreference-avi
>>>> Date:            16 September 2003
>>>> Author:            Avi Bryant
>>>>
>>>> Adds a preference to control whether or not to show warnings for
>>>> deprecated methods.  The preference is off by default."!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>