[Zope3-dev] Re: Eggs for deprecated packages

[Jim Fulton]

I think we need to have a much more basic discussion.

IMO deprecation was a reasonable thing to try that hasn't really  
worked out well.  People find deperecation warnings to be very  
annoying and I don't think it's going to be practical to make  
backward-concompatable changes when eggs are used. I suggest that  
generally, in the future, eggs should not be deprecated but just end- 
of-lifed.  When we are tempted to make a backward cincompatible to a  
package, we should create a new one.  Generally, there is little cost  
in just leaving old packages around.

Unfortunately, there are two poitentially significant costs in  
keeping obsolete eggs:

1. They may break with newer Python versions. :(

2. The may be in the dependencies of other eggs.  If they are used  
internally, then, of course, the dependent eggs can be rewritten to  
use newer non-obsolete eggs.  In other cases, like zope.app, the  
dependency exists to provide some feature and can't be removed  
without introducing a backward-incompatible change to the dependent egg.

Honestly, I'm not sure how to deal with these issues, especially the  
later. Maybe for collection eggs like zope.app, we have to accept  
deprecation and backward-incompatible changes, at least for a while.

Jim

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