[tei-council] TEI deprecation practices

[Martin Holmes]

HI Kevin,

This is very helpful. The first thing that occurs to me is that the 
"soft deprecation" method is hard to notice in the Guidelines; the Note 
in which it's mentioned in e.g. <relationGrp> is right at the bottom of 
the page:

<http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-relationGrp.html>

and many people would use the tag unknowingly without getting that far. 
The fact that <relationGrp> is no longer mentioned in the chapter linked 
from the element page is perhaps a clue, but not a very good one. We 
could make the deprecation more evident by putting some signal directly 
into the first row/cell of the element page (such as the red text shown 
in the hard-deprecated @targets definition).

Personally, I don't like the distinction between hard and soft 
deprecation. What "soft" really means in the case of e.g. relationGrp is 
that the element is retained for backwards-compatibility; I think that 
should always be temporary, albeit perhaps long-lasting, and the 
end-result of deprecation should be eventual removal/replacement.

Cheers,
Martin

On 12-08-04 01:42 PM, Kevin Hawkins wrote:
> Councilors (cc'ing Laurent),
>
> I've been having some confused discussions with various people about
> deprecation practices for the Guidelines, and I realized that I was not
> even sure of our practice any more.  I've done lots of archeology in
> meeting minutes and in Sourceforge and have produced what I think is a
> summary of our deprecation practices, plus some questions:
>
> http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Deprecation
>
> Please review.
>
> I hope once we sort this out, I will be able to move forward on
> http://purl.org/tei/bug/3376456 , and it might also help James with
> http://purl.org/tei/bug/3435326 .
>
> By the way, I've added a link to the wiki page from a new question and
> answer I've just added to the Council FAQ:
>
> http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/TEI-Council-FAQ#In_what_ways_will_Council_break_backwards_compatibility.3F
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kevin
>