Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Your quibbles are altogether unreasonable.

> you can stub out a method with a print statement that says "don't use this" and still deprecate it.

That’s not deprecation. That’s breaking the method.

To define “works” somewhat more specifically: deprecation means that functionality is not materially altered from how it was before the deprecation. (You might devise some way of notifying users—e.g. DeprecationWarning in Python, #[deprecated] in Rust—but this does not materially alter functionality.)

The January notice was a deprecation (even if they mislabelled it). This notice is not a deprecation, because the service was already deprecated. This notice defines a sunset timeline, but does not alter the parameters of the deprecation.




> That’s not deprecation. That’s breaking the method.

It's both. You can even break a feature and deprecate it for that reason. Deprecation comes down to communication.

> deprecation means that functionality is not materially altered from how it was before the deprecation.

No it doesn't. Maybe you really want it to, but it doesn't.

> This notice is not a deprecation, because the service was already deprecated.

That's not how that works... you can deprecate something and deprecate it again. Each notice is the deprecation if you don't realize this I don't know what you're still going on about...


> It's both. You can even break a feature and deprecate it for that reason. Deprecation comes down to communication.

To deprecate something is to recommend against it's use, but it must still be possible to use it without heeding the depreciation.

Removing all the functionality of something and replacing it with a debug message is not depreciation, it's discontinuation.

>> deprecation means that functionality is not materially altered from how it was before the deprecation.

> No it doesn't. Maybe you really want it to, but it doesn't.

Do you accept that your view of deprecation is not compatible with the definition in say, Wikipedia?


You're very wrong about how deprecating an API works.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: