Dear sage-devel,
A while back we decided that we shouldn't just randomly break users' existing code even if the reason is very good (e.g. there are 20 names for the exact same thing, and 19 of them are just bad, or we want to change to a better convention for something). The idea was that features, names, etc. should not simply be removed, but they should be deprecated; so they would continue to work just as before for a while, but they would display a DeprecationWarning whenever they are used. I guess the idea is that the user would eventually get tired of seeing the warning and finally switch to the new and improved notation, convention, whatever. There was some discussion of the length of time for which we should keep deprecated features around before finally throwing them out, but as far as I know there was no clear decision on this (and the Developer Guide doesn't mention anything about this). Can we decide on something? I don't really have strong feelings about this, but given some of the issues that transpired in the thread about stable/conservative versions of Sage, I would tend to pick something like 12 months (which for Sage counts as rather long-term). Of course this wouldn't have to be set in stone and we could revisit the decision in 20 years once/if the pace of development has slowed down. Another question is how we can efficiently keep track of deprecated things. Having thought about this for a whole 3 minutes: we could set up a new component on trac, called "deprecation"; each time a patch deprecating something gets a positive review, the patch author should create a new deprecation ticket, which could contain a time stamp in its title, and refer to the original ticket. Then bored/conscientious people could comb through these deprecation tickets once in a while and, once the time is up, actually remove the deprecated stuff. Stupid example: say I want to rename the matrix method "echelonize" to "echelonise". I write a patch implementing this today, and Minh is so happy about seeing this that he immediately gives it a positive review. So I make a new ticket titled "2010-11-02: get rid of M.echelonize", and I mention the original ticket in the description. Thoughts? Best, Alex -- Alex Ghitza -- Lecturer in Mathematics -- The University of Melbourne -- Australia -- http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~aghitza/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
