docs/deprecations/how_to_deprecate.pod - How to Deprecate Parrot Code
How to Deprecate Parrot Code.
You've found a crufty bit of code in Parrot that's just screaming to be removed. Welcome to the club. There's a lot of them. This page documents the proper procedure to go through to get that junk code out of Parrot while causing minimal pain to Parrot's users (i.e. people who develop HLLs or libraries on top of Parrot).
file a ticket
add a note to api.yaml
maybe post to parrot-dev and/or parrot-users depending on the nature of the change
get some feedback indicating that the change is sane
set up automatic usage detection using api.yaml regexes (static usage detection) and/or Parrot_warn_deprecated (dynamic usage detection)
pick an eligible release for the deprecation policy
backwards-incompatible changes can't happen until a stable release has gone out the door with a notification of the coming deprecation
see: http://docs.parrot.org/parrot/latest/html/docs/project/support_policy.pod.html Parrot Release and Support Policy for more information
write the code, possibly in a branch
unless it's highly impractical, maintain backwards-compatibility to ease the migration - this also means you can commit your changes immediately and remove the deprecated interface later
test your changes with current HLLs and libraries such as partcl-nqp, Rakudo, winxed, Kakapo, etc
add a summary of your change to ParrotDeprecations
add a complete description to the appropriate version transition deprecations page (e.g. [wiki:ParrotDeprecationsFor2.6 ParrotDeprecationsFor2.6])
walk through the documentation to ensure that it's sufficient for a user to use to upgrade his or her code
Add the tag of "completed" to the entry in api.yaml
make sure the HLLs and libraries are ready for the deprecation (and submit patches if not)
merge or commit your backwards-incompatible changes to master
close the deprecation ticket, linking to the wiki transition documentation
bump PBC_COMPAT and run mk_native_pbc if needed
that's it