On the other hand, if you never clean up cruft, you advance the date at which a rewrite from scratch becomes necessary. Code which hasn't had the entropy removed becomes brittle and hard to understand.
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-----Original message----- From: Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 06:23:45 GMT+00:00 Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make the life of extension developers easier?
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Generally speaking, we should only throw warnings or remove old interfaces that are actively broken (do not work correctly) or can no longer be sanely maintained -- removing a deprecated interface is a fairly extreme step and should never be done just to make things look cleaner.
There may be little or even *negative* benefit to going around and changing all the calling code to use the new interface. I've seen *lots* of regressions in commits that swap something to a new interface without taking into account how the interface actually changed, and they're harder to track down because the changes are often buried in generic code clean-up.
+1000.
Rob
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On 9/7/11, Russell N. Nelson - rnnelson rnnelson@clarkson.edu wrote:
On the other hand, if you never clean up cruft, you advance the date at which a rewrite from scratch becomes necessary. Code which hasn't had the entropy removed becomes brittle and hard to understand.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone
-----Original message----- From: Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 06:23:45 GMT+00:00 Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Can we make the life of extension developers easier?
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Generally speaking, we should only throw warnings or remove old interfaces that are actively broken (do not work correctly) or can no longer be sanely maintained -- removing a deprecated interface is a fairly extreme step and should never be done just to make things look cleaner.
There may be little or even *negative* benefit to going around and changing all the calling code to use the new interface. I've seen *lots* of regressions in commits that swap something to a new interface without taking into account how the interface actually changed, and they're harder to track down because the changes are often buried in generic code clean-up.
+1000.
Rob
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On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 9/7/11, Russell N. Nelson - rnnelson rnnelson@clarkson.edu wrote:
Thank you for contributing.... emptiness?
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
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