On Sunday, 2 July 2017 at 23:27:26 UTC, Seb wrote:
1) Stop making such a fuzz about having a long deprecation period. Most people will only care about a deprecation when their project doesn't compile anymore. A deprecation period of two releases is more than enough for users that care. As seen even _eight_ releases don't help! (std.c was deprecated in 2.067)
Long deprecation periods are really useful for situations where you need to support a wide range of compiler frontend versions (e.g. DMD and GDC, or whatever ancient D version is packaged on Debian/CentOS stable). They're also very helpful for regression testing, as you don't have to add static ifs all over just to test if the same otherwise effectively identical code worked in older compilers.
Once the relevant symbols are deprecated and removed from documentation, they have almost no cost, so there is no pressure to remove them quickly. I think overall it's more useful to leave old stuff around for longer rather than shorter amounts of time.
