3 ms·

I think almost no one knew it was deprecated. It's been in Unix since 1979, and it's a two-line shell script – I don't really see what the point of deprecating

by arp242 3y ago

I think almost no one knew it was deprecated. It's been in Unix since 1979, and it's a two-line shell script – I don't really see what the point of deprecating let alone removing it is.

cratermoon 3y ago
Shouldn't the package maintainers for the big distributions be paying attention to things like this? RedHat was able to notice that the LibreOffice rpms were orphaned and drop support for it. Perhaps the deprecation could have been communicated more broadly, but really, in 15 years, nobody looked at the release notes and thought to make a change?
- arp242 3y ago
  > in 15 years, nobody looked at the release notes and thought to make a change? What change could have been made? Package managers can't "just" remove it as that would break people's scripts, and adding their own warning message leaves us where we are now. I suppose a package-message could be added, but I don't think anyone expected that [ef]grep would start printing warning messages all of the sudden – lots of things are "deprecated" but still work and will likely continue to work for decades to come – so why bother?
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    Why bother deprecating things if they aren’t ever going to be removed? With deprecate and remove them after a reasonable time or don’t bother.
    - arp242 3y ago
      You can discourage people from using it while still maintaining compatibility. I have a Go library with some functions that have been deprecated since Go 1.1 (2013); they're just some aliases or wrappers for the newer symbols. They will stay there forever until I have enough reason to release a v2 (which may be never). POSIX also includes plenty of legacy/deprecated stuff like mktemp() that will likely never be removed. A CLI is a public interface; breaking compatibility is kinda bad.
    - JdeBP 3y ago
      The complainant who set this off (by filing a GNU bug report) said the same. Ironically, several people missed that one of xyr acceptable outcomes was just removing the claim about deprecation from the manual page.

by arp242 3y ago

I think almost no one knew it was deprecated. It's been in Unix since 1979, and it's a two-line shell script – I don't really see what the point of deprecating let alone removing it is.

cratermoon 3y ago

Shouldn't the package maintainers for the big distributions be paying attention to things like this? RedHat was able to notice that the LibreOffice rpms were orphaned and drop support for it. Perhaps the deprecation could have been communicated more broadly, but really, in 15 years, nobody looked at the release notes and thought to make a change?

arp242 3y ago
> in 15 years, nobody looked at the release notes and thought to make a change? What change could have been made? Package managers can't "just" remove it as that would break people's scripts, and adding their own warning message leaves us where we are now. I suppose a package-message could be added, but I don't think anyone expected that [ef]grep would start printing warning messages all of the sudden – lots of things are "deprecated" but still work and will likely continue to work for decades to come – so why bother?
- cratermoon 3y ago
  Why bother deprecating things if they aren’t ever going to be removed? With deprecate and remove them after a reasonable time or don’t bother.
  - arp242 3y ago
    You can discourage people from using it while still maintaining compatibility. I have a Go library with some functions that have been deprecated since Go 1.1 (2013); they're just some aliases or wrappers for the newer symbols. They will stay there forever until I have enough reason to release a v2 (which may be never). POSIX also includes plenty of legacy/deprecated stuff like mktemp() that will likely never be removed. A CLI is a public interface; breaking compatibility is kinda bad.
  - JdeBP 3y ago
    The complainant who set this off (by filing a GNU bug report) said the same. Ironically, several people missed that one of xyr acceptable outcomes was just removing the claim about deprecation from the manual page.