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. --