Re: Next stable release?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 10 Jun 2008, at 14:28, David Ayers wrote:

> Richard Frith-Macdonald schrieb:
>
> I believe that marking features that will be merely moved to - 
> additions
> as deprecated is misleading.  To me deprecation means prepare for
> removal... i.e. adapt all your code.  If it just means "we are  
> thinking
> about this" then deprecation means "follow the commits minutely to see
> what actually happens".
>
> So please...
> a) reconsider deprecating anything that you are not sure that we  
> need to
> remove and
> b) only remove things that pose a real maintenance burden.
>
> It really isn't fun updating a hoard of custom applications just  
> because
> Apple has the resources to churn the API and Runtime as it is  
> currently
> doing.

I understand where you are coming from, but I don't have a good  
solution.
We are rushed to do a new release this week, so we don't have a lot of  
time to come up with a solution.

Where we have methods which are GNUstep specific, they ought to be in  
the additions library ... so assuming we get round to moving them,  
anyone using them will need to change their software to include the  
appropriate headers.  A small change, but still one they need to be  
aware of.

I agree that a change like this is hardly as radical as 'prepare for  
removal', but we still need to let developers know somehow, and we  
don't have a mechanism for telling them to "follow the commits  
minutely to see what actually happens".  In fact, I guess they would  
ignore that anyway.

What I was thinking of doing was marking things as deprecated (since  
the version macros let us do that, and autogsdoc will adjust the  
documentation accordingly), and putting something in the release notes  
to explain exactly what we mean by deprecated in this release (ie that  
a few things will go completely, but most will just be moved into the  
additions library and require different headers to be included).

If you have a better idea of how to go about this sort of thing I'm  
very willing to listen (even time consuming alternatives if you want  
to volunteer to help out).  I just don't want inaction to perpetuate  
the situation where people complain about lack of Apple compatibility.