From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: RE: Deprecate _emacs on Windows Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:23:14 +0900 Message-ID: <87r59x9571.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <0B6A6EC5FD8F46D697F914FB2F6D4304@us.oracle.com> <655D5DBB48F04F719130122440CDA29B@us.oracle.com> <87pqpi8qui.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <9BB0B675F0A64762BC3FDBD9A9B02C1A@us.oracle.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1300897104 28451 80.91.229.12 (23 Mar 2011 16:18:24 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:18:24 +0000 (UTC) Cc: 'Juanma Barranquero' , 'Lennart Borgman' , 'Stefan Monnier' , 'Emacs developers' To: "Drew Adams" Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Wed Mar 23 17:18:20 2011 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Q2QlH-0002yu-95 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:18:19 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:60302 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Q2QlG-0003Mt-Je for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:18:18 -0400 Original-Received: from [140.186.70.92] (port=33971 helo=eggs.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Q2QlC-0003Mn-Bv for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:18:15 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Q2QlB-0007uO-0V for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:18:14 -0400 Original-Received: from mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.224]:52983) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Q2QlA-0007uE-GG for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:18:12 -0400 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 218F69706AF; Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:18:10 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 79201120E70; Thu, 24 Mar 2011 01:23:14 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: <9BB0B675F0A64762BC3FDBD9A9B02C1A@us.oracle.com> X-Mailer: VM 8.1.93a under 21.5 (beta29) "garbanzo" eac2e6bd5b2c+ XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6 (newer, 3) X-Received-From: 130.158.97.224 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:137581 Archived-At: Drew Adams writes: > So you are _not_ saying that in your experience - in all the > projects you know of - there was ever _actually_ a warning message > used to convey a deprecation notice. Hm? Maybe you should go into reading tea leaves instead of emacs-devel. You could make a lot of money with that kind of creative interpretation. > That's an opinion, an interpretation of the meaning of deprecation. No, it's not *merely* an opinion, it's the official policy of the Python project. Google for "DeprecationWarning" and "PendingDeprecationWarning" and read PEP 5. (It's short.) > > Formal deprecation is a policy statement that this feature > > should *not* be used, > > in the future (deprecation is not desupport; it precedes desupport) Yes, of course that is the relationship between deprecation and desupport, but there are other consequences of deprecation, in general. Deprecated functionality is normally not considered to warrant support when implementing new features. It is also often the case that deprecated features *are* dangerous or buggy-by-design. Again, it seems to me that you are objecting to accompanying deprecation with a warning because you thing it's overblown *in this case*. I think there is a good rule of thumb: if a feature is not so bad as to warrant an obtrusive deprecation warning, then it's probably not worth deprecating. > > and yes, that should indeed get a warning. > > No, that doesn't follow at all. Of course it doesn't follow. It's a policy, more or less arbitrary. Here, "should indeed" *is* my opinion. > What danger are you warning users about? It happens that three days ago, due to a change someone made in XEmacs, my init file failed to get loaded. I was *pissed*. Another example: somebody who depends on the init file to set up accessibility features could be crippled. Yes, I think this is important enough to warn people who use this feature. I infer you think that users should read NEWS. That's a reasonable opinion, but one I disagree with, and one many users take *strong* exception to. They do not want to read NEWS to continue using an upgraded program as they are accustomed to. > But deprecation in general, as a rule, is not accompanied by > WARNINGs. Of course it is. Compilers issue warnings all the time about deprecated features and usages. That's what they're called, "warnings". It's true that in my experience UIs rarely issue deprecation warnings, but that's mostly because the programs I use almost never deprecate features that are part of the UI. They just add new UI. The only case I can remember was when XEmacs decided to move from supporting both the "Emacs" application class and the "XEmacs" application class in the X resource database to supporting "XEmacs" only. In that case we explicitly decided not to warn because it seemed likely that most people with "Emacs" in their .Xresources would have it there because they use Emacs as well as XEmacs, so it was inherently ambiguous as to whether the user needed to be informed -- even once the feature is removed from XEmacs, it is still needed for use with Emacs. > Are you trying to make [the deprecation decision into an issue] again? No. You're being exceptionally tendentious this week, Drew.