[Interest] The willy-nilly deletion of convenience methods (was: Mixing Commercial and Open...)

[Roland Hughes]

On 3/19/21 7:51 AM, Volker Hilsheimer wrote:
>> On 19 Mar 2021, at 12:12, Roland Hughes <roland at logikalsolutions.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 3/19/21 6:00 AM, Giuseppe D'Angelo wrote:
>>> Il 18/03/21 12:41, Christian Gagneraud ha scritto:
>>>
>>>> My main grief is that Qt doesn't seem to care about C++.
>>>> What was their last contribution to the standard?
>>>>
>>> Apart from hiring the ex-chair of the WG21 Evolution Working Group?
>>>
>>> (Can we stop with the FUD please?)
>>>
>> Can we stop the willy-nilly deletion of existing convenience methods currently used in products in the field?
>> -- 
>> Roland Hughes, President
> Hey Roland,
>
> Giving Qt 6 a leaner API was a conscious decision in many cases to avoid the API from bloating too much. We can add convenience wrappers and overloads when we see that they are really needed.
>
> We might have gone a bit far in some cases, but the porting experiences I’ve read so far suggest that by and large it has been a rather decent experience.
>
> Do you have any particular classes in mind?
>
> Volker
>
I'm sure the person who was complaining repeatedly to Giuseppe will pipe 
up if they are still using Qt. That was a long thread in here last year. 
It lead to other long threads.

You cannot remove existing functionality without surveying the user base 
to find out if it is used. That person took a big hit with a lot of 
needless retesting and coding because of a willy-nilly removal.

Once you ship it, you can't remove it, until __after__ it dies on the 
field. Doesn't matter what "it" is. This is called product stability. I 
do not know if it was an FDA regulated product that impacted. I do know 
that if it was FDA regulated the odds of them being able to slip it 
through the "minor enhancement" (don't remember the official name) 
testing and approval path with that level of modification would be slim. 
That would mean lots of additional expense for them and everyone else 
impacted by the removal.

This also lead to a lengthy discussion about API stability. You can also 
find that in the archives for last year and probably in 2019 as well.

For the SAFETY world where human/animal life is at Risk, LTS is roughly 
20 years (over 30 in some markets) and STS (Short Term Support) is 7-10 
years.

Thinning out the API may have been a conscious decisions, but I never 
saw any messages on this list about things you were thinking about 
killing. Granted I get this in digest form and mostly skim the subjects 
for something of interest to me. Judging from the shock and length of 
that previous discussion nobody on here saw any such messages either. 
 From a customer base perspective these decisions were made in a vacuum 
and are helping to speed the complete abandonment of Qt.

In all fairness though, the licensing FUD already had it being kicked 
out the door in many places. When that is combined with a painful 
upgrade path the decision to re-platform is pretty easy. You are going 
to have to do the same amount of validation work anyway.

-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

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