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

[Thiago Macieira]

On Monday, 22 March 2021 14:55:04 PDT Roland Hughes wrote:
> A deprecation message at compile time is __not__ a warning to the
> installed base. This is especially true for things that were built with
> earlier versions of Qt and are now just being recompiled with a much
> later version.
> 
> A message in interest saying "Hey! We are about to nuke this, is anyone
> actually using it?"

The exact opposite is the correct thing:
 - deprecation messages while compiling the source code are correct
 - messages to the mailing list are not sufficient

The sample of developers in this mailing list is far too small. Any reply we 
got from here would not be significative. Warnings posted here would not reach 
the majority of the audience either.

But creating warnings when you compile your code is a good way to let people 
know that they have to take action at some time. No function can be removed 
until the next major version, so you have until then to figure out.

At that point, the decision has already been made. I am not discussing how to 
make the decision on deprecation. That's not a vote either: we don't remove 
things because we think no one uses them, with very few exceptions (like 
QLinkedList). We remove things because they are badly named, have flawed API 
or design, result in improper code, make progress impossible otherwise, etc.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel DPG Cloud Engineering