[TYPO3-dev] Getting rid of deprecated TypoScript stuff in TYPO3

[Oliver Hader]

Hi TYPO3 developers!

In the course of time many things in TYPO3 have been improved, changed,
updated, deleted and whatever. The reason for this message is that we
have a lot of deprecated stuff inside TYPO3 that once was "state of the
art" but is kind of elderly nowadays. And with all these updates and
improvements we collected some skeletons in the closet...

Several months/years ago we agreed on marking code in the TYPO3 Core
with the PHPDoc tag "@deprecated" and will remove the class or method
two minor releases later. This means a functionality marked as
deprecated in TYPO3 4.1 will be removed in TYPO3 4.3.

However, there are many more thing that were marked to be obsolete one
day but never have been cleaned up. By way of example if you search the
TypoScript reference (TSref) for the keyword "deprecated" you'll find a
lot of stuff...

So what now?

1) For PHP API functionalities it's easy... we can now remove the old
stuff that was declared as deprecated in TYPO3 4.1 and any earlier
release. If something breaks in extensions - since developers were not
able to update extensions withing two years - a PHP warning or error
will point this out. I must admit that this is not the smooth way, but
you'll exactly know what's wrong...

2) For TypoScript stuff this is a bit different. All deprecated stuff
still works and even if we remove these properties your website will
still work... but probably it behaves a bit different. And then you
might start to search what has been changed. Remember, there is no PHP
warning or error pointing out what is wrong.

There are three possibilities how to handle this:
a) Integrate checks for the out-dated stuff and blow up the whole source
code a bit more. When old stuff is found, a warning appears in some kind
of log file (sysLog or whatever).
b) Integrate a very complex update wizard in the install tool that
parses all TypoScript and configuration issues that are out-dated and
inform the administrator directly in the user interface.
c) Rely on the fact that it was stated in the documentation that
properties are "deprecated" and should not have been used any longer -
and... just remove the old stuff, save many checks during the processing
and speed up the whole rendering process.

Personally I'm in for "c)" but wanted to know about your opinion on that.

Well! Here we go!

olly
-- 
Oliver Hader
TYPO3 4.3 Release Manager