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>
> I think the confusion is that every company has their own
> deprecation policies. In most companies, deprecation means
> that no further engineering will be invested in a command or
> function--no bug fixes, no new capabilties. Many companies
> leave the code for the command/function in their software
> for some period of time in the interest of backwards
> compatibility (it's not nice to break your customers' processes
> or applicaiton programs) even if they know the code is a dead
> issue. Kenneth was simply wishing that companies would
> indicate if/when they intended to actually remove the
> command/function from the software.
>
Fred, that was exactly what I was trying to say.
Developers using your software will probably say, "Oh! Thanks for
telling me that 'get.coffee' has now been deprecated and I should start
using 'get.hot.mocha' instead in any new code I write. Now, would you
mind letting me know how long before your software barfs any time it
runs across a 'get.coffee' command in one of my old apps or other code
blocks I wrote using previous releases of your program. Will it happen
in this release? Will 'get.coffee' be recognized for three more
releases? Or do you plan your software to be backward compatible until
the end of time so my old apps will always be able to 'get.coffee'
whenever they call for it?" ;-)
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