[vlc-devel] [PATCH 5/5] purge obsolete options removed in v2.2

[Lyndon Brown]

On Tue, 2020-09-29 at 18:18 +0300, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:
> Le maanantaina 28. syyskuuta 2020, 23.38.38 EEST Lyndon Brown a écrit
> :
> > v2.2 was released 5 1/2 years ago.
> > 
> > v3.0 was released 2 1/5 years ago, which in some sense is a long
> > development time, but I can understand pushing it in terms of
> > giving
> > people time to notice things and take action, if we consider more
> > use
> > cases than simple ad-hoc manual command line execution.
> 
> What kind of logic is this? 99.999% of users don't use development
> vesions.
> 
> 3.0 is the *current* release.

Yes, obviously. There's nothing wrong with my logic here, I think
you're confusing what I'm talking about.

Firstly, please note that all of these patches are targetted at v4.0-
dev, so when I've mentioned 'v3.0', I'm not talking about making any
changes to v3.0 itself, only the v4.0-dev code.

The 'since' tags mark the release version that disabled the option,
hence we're marking newly obsoleted options in v4.0-dev with 'v4.0.0'.

Each of these 'v2.0', 'v2.1', etc patches do **not** remove options
obsoleted _since_ those versions; They finish removing the options that
those versions had made obsolete, i.e. that have 'since' tags of
'v2.0.0', 'v2.1.0', etc respectively.

Please note that the first 'pre2.0' patch is covering options with
'since' tags < v2.0, i.e. it does _not_ cover the options the v2.0
release obsoleted; that's done in the 'v2.0' patch.

So, if more explanation is needed, the v2.2 release disabled a certain
set of options that had previously existed, leaving a warning for them.
The corresponding 'v2.2' patch here (to be applied to v4.0-dev) removes
the remaining artefacts of those options, on a basis that by the time
v4.0 is released, users will have been using v2.2 for long enough that
they have had enough time to get used to those options no longer being
available, so we no longer (in the v4.0 release) need to be issuing the
warning for them rather than a generic unknown option error. Of course
if conversely it is felt that it still will not have been enough time,
then we don't merge that one yet.

v3.0 disabled some further options. It has been available for 2 1/2
years so far. If it is considered that enough time will have passed by
the time v4.0 is released, for users to get used to the loss of options
v3.0 removed, then we could apply a further 'v3.0' patch to drop the
warning for them in v4.0, but I expected that was likely going too far
so did not bother making this patch.

When v4.0 is released, even if all of these patches *and* a
hypothetical 'v3.0' patch are merged, it would still be issuing
warnings for options that v4.0 has disabled since the v3.0 release.

I deliberately split the v2.x stuff into separate patches to allow for
easy choice to be made on how much to remove in v4.0.

> 2.2 has been the support until a little over 2 years ago. It's still
> in use in 
> Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Right, but again, this is perfectly inline with my logic. If v2.2 is
the minimum common version in use, users are used to the option set it
provides, and the loss of options it removed. It thus should not be a
problem in v4.0 to turn warnings for options v2.2 removed into generic
unknown option errors, by applying the 'v2.2' patch.