[asterisk-dev] Reintroduce deprecated applications

[Dmitry Andrianov]

Well, it is clear I'm going to be a minority on this subject but to me keeping old apps is a bad idea.

1. There will be a lot of work maintaining these. Next time you introduce some "global" change like new FOO API which should be used instead of BAR API, you will have update 2x applications. As time goes, you will be updating more and more applications which you keep for a tiny share of users.

2.Chances some old app is not properly updated with some major/API change are increased (because these are excluded from build by default). Developers needs to be careful to make sure they "turn on" the ancient apps to make sure it builds Ok. They will also need spend extra time testing these.


To me, if there are newer and better methods of doing something, it should be Ok to deprecate the old one. I believe the current approach of doing this in Asterisk is really good. I'm talking about deprecating functionality in one release and removing in the next one. This gives users at least 2 years to update.

I'm sure that every major release brings changes that will require me to update the dialplan, sometimes seriously. And by the way, other config wiles may need to be revised too. You cannot avoid that. And couple of deprecated apps would just add little changes.

What I could not understand is why application does not issue deprecation warning every time it is used? People won't notice single warning in on the console. But when the warning repeats, they may pay attention long before the application disappears.

Just my $0.02

Regards,
Dmitry Andrianov

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Tilghman Lesher
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 2:38 AM
To: Asterisk Developers Mailing List
Subject: [asterisk-dev] Reintroduce deprecated applications

So I've been thinking about some of the recent criticism we've gotten about
deprecating applications in 1.2 (deprecation warnings that it seems that
everybody ignored), and subsequently removing the applications in 1.4.  The
reason we did that was because we found better ways to express concepts in
the dialplan, so we naturally wanted people to move to the better ways.  Since
we've gotten a lot of flack for that decision, I am floating the idea of
reintroducing those applications in 1.4, and possibly of never removing
dialplan applications at all.

To deal with the amount of possible extra applications floating around, I am
proposing setting up these applications so that they are by default unselected
for building, but may be reenabled very easily via the menuselect system.
Note that menuselect allows you to set up a configuration file in your home
directory, which would allow you to save your preferences as to which
applications will be automatically selected when you download a new release
and install.

The reason we would like to unselect by default the old applications is
twofold:  first, we would like to keep the default footprint small, and
second, we would like to continue to encourage new users to use the newer
methods.

Additionally, after some internal discussions at Digium, we are proposing that
these deprecated applications will get bugfixes and security fixes, but no new
features.

I am putting this out there in front of the community of developers to get
some feedback before we try implementing this.  I'm sure I haven't thought of
everything, so I hope we can have a discussion about this proposal.

--
Tilghman

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