On 11/03/21 09:38, Markus Armbruster wrote:
If we decide we want something else, keep -usbdevice braille deprecated until something else is ready, then keep it deprecated for a sensible grace period, then remove it. Flip-flopping deprecation in between is not helpful. If we can't make up our minds, keep it deprecated until we do. Only if we decide the sugar should remain -usbdevice braille, we should undeprecate it now. The road to the CLI hell we're in is paved with "convenience".
A lot of the work I did in 6.0 on vl.c and friends was exactly to figure out:
- which of our CLI interfaces are a maintainability issue and really need deprecation
- which of our CLI interfaces can be modified to improve maintainability and simplify the addition of new interfaces
- how machine creation *really* works, so that it's easy to add things at the right spot.
Of course _everything_ is a maintenance cost, but you can at least make sure that the cost is not visible to most developers. This series, as well as the previous removal of parameterized -usbdevice is just doing that: keep the decent parts that do not hamper maintainability, deprecate/remove the rest.
Paolo
