28 Mar
2012
28 Mar
'12
8:06 p.m.
On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 12:27 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
Hi devs,
I'd like to change our deprecation strategy. Here's what we are currently
supposed to use (we voted it a long time ago):
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/DevelopmentPractices#HDepreca…
"
In addition our rule is to keep @deprecated methods/classes for 2 final releases after
the version where they were first added has been released as final.
For example if a method is deprecated in, say XE 1.3M2 then the method will be removed in
1.6M1 or after. Of course any major new release can deprecate anything. For example a
XWiki 2.0 release is allowed to break backward compatibility (obviously we need to be
careful to offer a migration path for users of previous major versions).
"
Issues:
* This seems a bit harsh to me for some of our users/devs in the community.
* We're not following which proves to me it's not a good rule
* It doesn't say anything about Scripting APIs which require a greater stability in
order not to break all wiki pages
Definition of a Scripting API:
* a Script Service (that's the new way of providing script apis)
* a class in the "api" package in xwiki-platform-oldcore (this is the old way
of providing script apis)
Thus I'd like to propose this new rule:
* Deprecated methods can only be removed in the next Release Cycle. For example something
deprecated in version N.x can be removed in version N+1.y where x and y can be anything.
This is logical since N+1 means a new major release and it's common to understand that
major releases have no guarantee of API compatibility (See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning for example).
I don't like it too much, that mean you can deprecated something in
3.5 and remove it in 4.0. I think I would prefer to have a rule saying
that a full cycle must be pasted before you remove something and that
you remove things in N+2.0.
* For scripting APIs we can remove deprecated API only
after 4 Release Cycles. For example since we're in 4.x this means we can remove
deprecated APIs from 0.x releases. And when we start 5.x we will be able to remove
deprecated scripting apis deprecated in 1.x.
Here's my +1
Thanks
-Vincent
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Thomas Mortagne