Questions tagged [deprecation]
In the process of authoring computer software, its standards or documentation, or other technical standards - deprecation is a status applied to features, characteristics, or practices to indicate that they should be avoided, typically because they have been superseded.
25 questions
8 votes
2 answers
1k views
Is there a term that's kind of the opposite of 'deprecated' - that's 'in future major versions this thing will be required'
In terms of deprecation strategies, we can mark a value as deprecated and this can imply that 'this thing exists now and should work, but in future major releases this thing may disappear and will ...
- 2,769
3 votes
4 answers
1k views
What log level use for deprecated features?
There is a feature that is now deprecated and going to be removed. Adding a logging statement, observed by some alerting mechanism, can help finding out whether the feature is still being actively ...
- 147
1 vote
1 answer
140 views
Terminology - Changing the behaviour of a function but not it's name [closed]
Consider this situation: there is a method getFoo(). It now becomes appearent that the method as-is is not useful or even encourages faulty code to be written upon it. A breaking change (e.g. ...
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39 votes
8 answers
10k views
How long to wait before deleting a deprecated method? [closed]
I am maintaining a public API and have to deprecate a method. Is there a general rule on how many months/years/versions before the deletion I should deprecate a method?
- 2,963
3 votes
0 answers
182 views
Ripple Effect Analysis using coupling metrics
How can I observe ripple effect using coupling attributes alone? I first find the common coupling metrics for a set of deprecated classes in a project, like CBO(Coupling Between Objects), RFC(...
- 39
69 votes
12 answers
23k views
Prevent deprecated code from compiling after reaching a deadline [closed]
In my team we have been cleaning a lot of old stuff in a big monolithic project (whole classes, methods, etc.). During that cleaning tasks I was wondering if there is a kind of annotation or library ...
- 817
0 votes
1 answer
768 views
Best practices for data deprecation
I have inherited a 10+ year old project that has been handed down through many developers. Needless to say, there are many instances where there is some class or object property that no one knows what ...
- 111
1 vote
1 answer
1k views
What is the best use of @Deprecated Java annotation for a monolithic server code with multiple clients?
There is that @Deprecated annotation which suits well for Java libraries. A minor release change would not break an existing code if a deprecated library method remains. The library compilation will ...
- 11
1 vote
1 answer
123 views
Mechanically measuring/enforcing diminishing use of a deprecated API over time?
One of the last projects I worked on had a lot of deprecated methods. Are there any good strategies for making sure that the use of these methods actually decreases over time? The example below is ...
- 298
1 vote
1 answer
340 views
Is it proper to deprecate a method/class temporarily?
Based upon definitions I have read of the term deprecation, I get a general sense that deprecation is usually reserved for moving on to other methods/classes for good for reasons such as (and I borrow ...
- 141
3 votes
2 answers
3k views
What's a good way to deprecate your NPM modules?
One of my NPM modules is, frankly, pretty lame, hasn't been worked on in years, has no watchers, no stars, and only ~50 downloads per month. I'm going to abandon it, and eventually delete it so it ...
- 9,029
3 votes
1 answer
917 views
How to deprecate an entire mobile application? [closed]
Six months ago I launched a free app that I developed and self-funded. From peak usage of a few thousand users, it has now bottomed out at a few hundred. It was an interesting project, from which I ...
29 votes
2 answers
13k views
Why is universal newlines mode deprecated in Python?
I just noticed that the universal newline feature of file operations seems to be on its way out. The documentation for Python 3.5 open's mode parameter indicates that it's deprecated: 'U' ...
- 5,578
113 votes
7 answers
48k views
Why are the <b> and <i> tags deprecated?
This question came up in one of my college classes. The professor only gave the answer that it was more descriptive, but it seems as though <b> and <i> are rather explicit in their meaning ...
- 1,261
29 votes
1 answer
1k views
How to deal with a misnamed function in production code?
I've recently come across a Python library on GitHub. The library is great, but contains one glaring typo in a function name. Let's call it dummy_fuction() while it should be dummy_function(). This ...
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