[TYPO3-core] Re: [TYPO3-core-internal] Deprecation strategy

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 8-7-2012 13:07, Ingmar Schlecht wrote:
> So, in short, I would be glad if we could consider the impact of such
> method removals and weigh it against the benefits.

It is a good thing to be predictable about things like deprecation. On 
the other had there is of course the question about the impact. In 
theory it would be nice to keep old versions of functions and slowly 
remove them once they are hardly used.
No the harsh reality. Extension authors in general do not actively 
maintain their extensions as much as we'd like to believe/see (of course 
there are numerous exceptions with regular updates).

A few of the frequently used extensions only added support for the new 
mail API (new in TYPO3 4.5) after the old API was actually removed.
When we removed the numeric list_type keys an extension didn't work 
anymore and fixed it by... setting the old numeric key again.

Deprecation logs are flooded by extensions which are only updated after 
deprecated functions are removed.

The whole deprecation procedure seems to be mainly for the relatively 
few extension authors who try to keep up-to-date with the new APIs.
While I wasn't a big fan of moving those frequently used functions, a 
longer deprecation period would only postpone the eventual effect.

-- 
Jigal van Hemert
TYPO3 Core Team member

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