Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:13:45 -0500 | From | Bill Davidsen <> | Subject | Re: "obsolete" versus "deprecated", and a new config option? |
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Robert P. J. Day wrote: > a couple random thoughts on the notion of obsolescence and > deprecation.
[...horrible example deleted...]
> so is that ioctl obsolete or deprecated? those aren't the same > things, a good distinction being drawn here by someone discussing > devfs: > > http://kerneltrap.org/node/1893 > > "Devfs is deprecated. This means it's still available but you should > consider moving to other options when available. Obsolete means it > shouldn't be used. Some 2.6 docs have confused these two terms WRT > devfs." > > yes, and that confusion continues to this day, when a single feature > is described as both deprecated and obsolete. not good. (also, i'm > guessing that anything that's "obsolete" might deserve a default of > "n" rather than "y", but that's just me. :-)
Agree on that. I would hope "obsolete" means there's a newer way which should provide the functionality (** help should say where that is **) while depreciated should mean "we decided this was a bad solution" or something like that. > > in any event, what about introducing a new config variable, > OBSOLETE, under "Code maturity level options"? this would seem to be > a quick and dirty way to prune anything that is *supposed* to be > obsolete from the build, to make sure you're not picking up dead code > by accident.
If you're doing that, why not four variables, for incomplete, experimental, obsolete and depreciated? Unfortunately doing any more detailed nomenclature would be a LOT of work! > > i think it would be useful to be able to make that kind of > distinction since, as the devfs writer pointed out above, the point of > labelling something "obsolete" is not to *discourage* someone from > using a feature, it's to imply that they *shouldn't* be using that > feature. period. which suggests there should be an easy, one-step > way to enforce that absolutely in a build. > > thoughts? > I think it's a good idea, but doing it right may be more work than the benefit justifies.
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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