Revision as of 12:04, 19 January 2009

Meeting Title:	AC Call on API Deprecation
Date & Time:	Monday January 19, 2009 at 1600 UTC / 0800 SFO / 1100 Ottawa / 1700 Berlin HTML | iCal
Dial-in:	(+1) 613.287.8000 (Ottawa and international) or 866.362.7064 (toll-free North America) passcode 464440#
Backup Dial-in:	International +44 (0)1452 567588 / Freephone +1 (866) 6161738 / Passcode: 0587322148 #

Attendees

• Doodle Poll for scheduling

Missing: BIRT, DTP, RT, STP, consumer rep, strategic reps

Notes

• See Architecture Council/Minutes January 15 2009#New Topics for previous discussions
• Part of the larger story on Eclipse Adoption.
• Goal is to
  • Define the questions that we'd like to get answered
  • come up with enough agreement to create initial rules / guidelines for review

Reasoning

• Eclipse APIs become ever more complicated and duplicated, making it harder and harder to understand.
• For e4 at least, we should make it simpler to code against Eclipse. We should get rid of unnecessary burden to make ourselves ready for the future.
• We need to talk about Deprecation policies NOW to incorporate them into Galileo (and thus be able to get rid of deprecated stuff sooner).
• Consider other technologies:
  • Deprecation in Java
  • Evolution of glibc

Questions

• Should the deprecation rules be the same for all projects, or different from project to project?
• By what channels can the Community be informed about deprecating API?
• How long does deprecated API need to stay around? Does it depend from case to case?

Next Meeting

• Architecture Council call on Thursday, February 12