From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>
Subject: Re: bug#38529: Make --ad-hoc the default for guix environment
 proposed deprecation mechanism
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2019 22:12:17 +0100
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To: Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net>
Cc: Guix Devel <guix-devel@gnu.org>, 38529@debbugs.gnu.org


Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net> writes:

>> Maybe I miss a point. It is not: "watch out, this will do something
>> else in the future" but "watch out, this was doing something else in
>> the past and the change happened the <date> in <commit>".
>
> Concrete example: I am writing a tutorial about using Guix for
> reproducible research. It shows several uses of "guix environment", some
> of them without '=E2=80=93add-hoc' or '=E2=80=93inputs-of'. I know my exa=
mples will
> cease to work in a few months. What am I supposed to do about this?

I wonder if we should simply bump the version number to indicate that
this is a breaking change?

Another more difficult option would be to do what responsible API
developers on the web do: to version their API and to make the API
version selectable.  I don=E2=80=99t know *how* to do this elegantly, and
there=E2=80=99s a real maintenance cost (it seems small in this case), but
configuration files can be used for changing new defaults.

--
Ricardo