[TYPO3-dev] Deprecation strategy for BE viewhelpers

[Helmut Hummel]

Hi!

On 05.08.13 11:37, Steffen Müller wrote:

> On 05.08.2013 10:07 Christian Kuhn wrote:
>> You create a dependency to a foreign extension just because of a single
>> view helper this way. This is tight coupling for no good reason, we
>> shouldn't do this:

Exactly. Full ACK.

>> The view helpers in extension manager, belog, beuser
>> and so on are dedicated to this extension only and can be changed at will.
>
> This is hard to understand for those who have not deep insight to the
> core structure:

Well, there are a lot of things which are hard to understand without 
deep insight ;)

> We have sysext:core, which contains the core API, then we have
> sysext:extensionmanager which is part of the core, but VH are non-API,
> then we have sysext:fluid which VH are API.
> IMHO chances are high to misunderstand this concept and rely on VH from
> extensionmanager, because they have public keypwrd and are shipped with
> the core.

There are a *lot* of places, which can be (and are) "abused" by 
extension developers to achieve sth. ...

> To keep our developers happy, we'd better deprecate UNTIL we
> have @internal notation.

... marking everything as @internal (like global arrays, public 
properties etc. could be useful, but there will always be things that 
break and only experience will tell you as a developer how to do things 
in a proper way to be as decoupled as possible and as compatible as 
possible with future versions.

>> We should imho state somewhere: "Only view helpers in ext:fluid are
>> public API and are part of the usual deprecation strategy, view helpers
>> in other core extensions are not public API and can change without
>> further notice." Maybe we can also annotate the other extensions view
>> helpers with @internal to make this clear when reading the code.
>
> +1

-1 to mark things as @internal but +1 to mark public API with @api like 
Flow does and documenting this fact somewhere.

It is better to have everything private by default and explicitly making 
things public than the other way around.

By doing so, forgetting an annotation would then mean this entity is 
private and likely to change.

Kind regards,
Helmut

-- 
Helmut Hummel
Release Manager TYPO3 6.0
TYPO3 Core Developer, TYPO3 Security Team Member

TYPO3 .... inspiring people to share!
Get involved: typo3.org