[Development] QtCS 2024 session on deprecations: what did we actually agree on?

[Ville Voutilainen]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2025 at 11:13, Ivan Solovev via Development
<development at qt-project.org> wrote:
> I tried to start a similar discussion in October [0], but there was no real
> conclusion apart from "let's decide on a case-by-case basis".
>
> My idea was that we can at least use the new to-be-removed approach on the
> APIs that we consider wrong or dangerous. But the reality is that we cannot
> agree even on that (consider the discussions about QScopedPointer::take()
> in [1]).
>
> It all makes me think that we really need to agree on some policy.

I wonder what such a policy would help. Let me explain what I mean by
my confusion:

1) suppose, hypothetically, that we have a policy "deprecated things
are removed in the next major version"
2) for some reason, we then say "except this thing here, for biz
reasons or otherwise"
3) someone might then say "no, the policy is to remove it", and be
pretty much ignored..
4) and then we end up discussing policy exceptions, quite like we
would discuss individual removals.

Drafting policies that predict the future is hard. And policies that
fail to predict the future tend to lose their
meaning due to there being so many policy exceptions.