Re: Dealing with interface deprecation

[Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>]

Hello!

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello Guix!
>
> In Guix, configuration is code, which is great!  But that also means
> users occasionally have to deal with things like “API deprecation”,
> which never sounds exciting, especially when all you want is to get your
> system upgraded Right Now.
>
> So I think it’s important to be very careful in how we deal with API
> deprecation, in particular in Guix System (and in Guix Home once we’ve
> removed the “technology preview” label).
>
> There were two examples where, with my “regular user” hat on (which I
> particularly enjoy), I got deprecation messages that were not actionable
> for me because they lacked source location info.  This was addressed by
> these changes:
>
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit?id=e0bd47b4fd5eb009f34004242e16b976e58756b0
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit?id=baf4272df2350a40bfa198f5cdb42e707e32ad71
>
> As you can see, providing good actionable messages for record field
> deprecation is a bit of a craft, but hopefully that gives an idea of how
> to get there; maybe we’ll eventually come up with a high-level way to
> express that.
>
> Packages may also be part of the “API”.  On ‘core-updates’, several TeX
> Live packages were deprecated but still used because there wasn’t any
> warning.  This is how I addressed it:
>
>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit?id=3dc8052b51241fe7857059d3300dad3a0f9f68fd
>
> Thoughts?  Tips and tricks?

Wow!  Thanks a lot for sharing these tips on the art of making better
deprecation!  I'll keep these commits bookmarked for the next time :-).

Maxim