On Friday 26 November 2010 15:19:37 Jason House wrote: > T2 - This should be quite long. There's no > reason to leave active projects with a non-compiling code base just > because an API in a low priority area has changed. I would say something > like 6-12 months. What do other languages do?
Java marks stuff as deprecated and then _never_ removes it. It makes the deprecation a bit of a joke really. Many people continue to use the deprecated stuff anyway. A prime example would be that they deprecated Date's most useful constructors in an effort to make you use the Calendar stuff. People keep on using those constructors anyway, because they don't care about the Calendar stuff, and it's a lot more of a pain to use. As far as I know, Sun has _never_ actually removed a deprecated function from Java's standard library (and if they haven't before, now they never will since they were eaten by Oracle - who knows what Oracle will do). Certainly, whatever we do, we don't want to follow Java's route. Hopefully there are other languages out there which handle deprecation better. Since I've mostly been a C++ and Java guy though, I'm not at all familiar with how other languages deal with it. Python would probably be a good place to look though, since they generally seem to be pretty organized. - Jonathan M Davis
