The article and very few comments acknowledge that this is being done to facilitate removal of these binaries. Assuming the binaries are going away, is it bette

The article and very few comments acknowledge that this is being done to facilitate removal of these binaries. Assuming the binaries are going away, is it better to add a warning, or to surprise people be just removing them? In general, there’s a good, legitimate, hard question here about how to handle removing things from our software. It needs to be done, probably more often than we do it, and it’s hard enough for software writers and maintainers to bring themselves to remove things. Are there better strategies? What more can we do to make removing features less painful, beyond publishing the deprecation schedule, adding a warning in advance, and then removing them after the schedule and the warning have been out for a while?