Hey,
I recently added a bunch of wfDeprecated calls to deprecated functions in
core using the new version argument and got a lot of flak for this, since
it caused notices for a lot of people. What a lot of people told me to do
is wait with adding these one or two releases, or at the very least replace
all callers with new equivalent code. This might seem reasonable at first
glance, but sort of undoes the whole point of wfDeprecated IMO. As
extension author I want to be able to see if my code is using any
deprecated functions, not just functions deprecated more then 2 releases
ago. Furthermore, expecting people to release all callers is often
unrealistic, since putting in new code might be context dependent, and
break compatibility with older versions of MediaWiki in extensions where
this is not wanted. So lot's of deprecated methods end up without a
wfDeprecated call at all, causing stuff to suddenly break. Those are 2 very
good reasons why wfDeprecated calls should be added immediately after
deprecating a function.
So what about the notices? Since we have $wgDeprecationReleaseLimit you can
set it to 2 releases back and achieve exactly the same result as delaying
adding the wfDeprecated calls without all the problems associated with that
approach.
This appears to much effort for people though, so what about changing the
default value of $wgDeprecationReleaseLimit from false to $rel - 2? Any
objections to that?
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil.
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