[bug#35544] [PATCH] services: dovecot: Rename auth-verbose-passwords?.

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

[...]

>> The question is whether it’s OK to break the API.  I’d say that with
>> proper documentation it probably is.  Thoughts?
>>
>> Longer-term we’ll need a way to gracefully handle deprecation for this
>> kind of change, probably at the level of the ‘define-record-type*’
>> kitchen sink.
>
> Yeah, I'm uncertain. For long running systems, it's probably good to
> update the packages, without having to adjust the service configuration
> for changes like this. If there was a "stable" channel to track, which
> didn't include updates to services, but did include important package
> updates, then that may be useful.
>
> Also, just making the errors relating to service configuration may be
> more impactful than adding extra deprecation support.

The problem, as I see it, is that possibly weeks from now people will
try to reconfigure and will get an error about
‘auth-verbose-passwords?’.  At that point they’ll have to dig to figure
out that there’s a field with a similar name and similar semantics and
to adjust their code accordingly.

But maybe the real solution is providing a “news” system, as discussed
with Tobias and others recently on guix-devel: ‘guix pull -N’ would
display a message saying that the Dovecot API has changed, etc.

Ludo’.