The future of deprecation messages …

[sevu]

How to handle deprecation messages in the future?

• 1.12 displayed them ingame to everybody playing it
• 1.14 hides them from everybody, except of the crazy people who start wesnoth from a terminal, or find the logs on Windows.

The old way was annoying, but it had better chances that someone gets involved and fixes it.
The current one somehow undermines the deprecation policy, as things are deprecated properly, but people won't fix it.

Maybe it's possible to display the deprecation messages dependent on whether the player has a _server.pbl in the add-on, or lacks an _info.cfg?

Current situation is, that as soon as I have other peoples add-ons installed, I get more deprecation messages than my terminal displays (I did set the buffer to 1000 lines).

In case we don't want to change anything about how / whom to display deprecation messages to, the log spam is mostly about FOREACH & NEXT. De-deprecating these two macros or dropping them already in 1.16 would be an alternative.

[Pentarctagon]

I've never really liked that the warnings (and deprecation messages especially) are to a certain degree hidden. Having those messages doesn't do anything if nobody ever sees them, and removing something that's deprecated when very few, if any, UMC authors will have seen the deprecation messages seems like it defeats the purpose of deprecating something in the first place.

So:

Maybe it's possible to display the deprecation messages dependent on whether the player has a _server.pbl in the add-on, or lacks an _info.cfg?

would be good, IMO. Something else would be to enable deprecation warnings by default on development branches (1.13, 1.15, etc).

[CelticMinstrel]

Did 1.12 even have deprecation messages? Anyway, the original intention when I implemented the deprecation system was that they're hidden unless someone enables debug mode. Developers commonly enable debug mode, so with this policy they'll be shown in-game only to the people who need to see them. The problem with that was that some players also commonly enable debug mode, but I'm pretty sure they can also be turned off in preferences? Hiding them by default is the worst option, I think. It's better to show them to everyone than hide them from everyone if those are the only two options.

I think that basing deprecation messages on the existence of a _server.pbl would be very difficult, as there's no way that I know of to associate a given deprecation message with a specific addon (and showing deprecation messages in all addons just because someone develops one addon is bad). However, it's a very good idea if it can be done.

[Pentarctagon]

One potential solution would be to add an option somewhere fairly visible if a _server.pbl is present, which would:

• Disable all add-ons that don't have a _server.pbl or are listed are dependencies of one that does.
• Reload the cache.
• Now show all deprecation messages.

[CelticMinstrel]

That requires a mechanism to disable addons; does that exist now?

[Pentarctagon]

It doesn't currently exist. A simple way to do that though would be to add something like -disabled to the end of the add-on folder, and then ignore folders than end with that text when reloading the cache.

[CelticMinstrel]

That seems like a rather poor method… but I think the basic idea is sound. Instead of checking for folders ending in -disabled, why not just test against a blacklist of disabled plugins? It would be basically the same thing but without requiring folders to be renamed. The blacklist could be either automatic (based on the presence of a _sever.pbl or whatever) or manual (from some new UI for disabling addons). Explicit dependencies would have to override the blacklist, of course…

[AI0867]

While the _server.pbl way sounds great, it will break rather badly in cases of hard dependencies on add-ons that are not your own.

[CelticMinstrel]

Well, that dependency would be enabled too, obviously… but that also means its deprecation messages would be shown.