Please reconsider planned build breakage on new KF deprecations

Friedrich W. H. Kossebau kossebau at kde.org
Wed Aug 18 15:27:29 BST 2021


Hi,

the recent deprecations in KF master around KPluginLoader broke some PIM 
builds for me, due to KF_DISABLE_DEPRECATED_BEFORE_AND_AT being set to a 
number only matching the upcoming KF versions, thus immediately changing 
things when new deprecations come up.

As someone who also works on KF once in a while (mainly for fixing things 
upstream where needed), thus builds latest KF master every few days, this now 
got heavily in my way and killed some time and energy.

I urge to reconsider this decision to enforce breakages of PIM master on new 
deprecations in KF master.

For me, it today wasted time resources and will also waste more, as I
* had to invest to find if my WIP patches broke things
* had to invest into work-arounds, which also need future care
* lost concentration and my mental setup around the current WIP
* (and had to invest into frustration management)

I totally understand the need to deal with usages of deprecated API in a 
timely manner to prepare for the future (being the who invested into having 
the option with KF libraries for eloborated deprecation markup, compare also 
https://frinring.wordpress.com/2019/09/09/more-control-over-warnings-for-and-visibility-of-deprecated-library-api-via-generated-export-macro-header/).

But I think that forcing people immediately into working on porting away from 
deprecated API by planned builds breakages is just wrong. Is it more urgent 
than fixing bugs & regressions? I think no. 
There are so many unit tests broken in PIM, and so far there have been at 
least two more serious regressions uncovered by the recent unit test fixes.
Then PIM code itself has lots of own deprecations which have not been dealt 
with in many years. This feels out of proportions to me.

Please reconsider the priorities here and the application of technology.
For myself, hitting this issue just harmed my motivation to a good degree, as 
I do not like to spend my time on things which have little or no use, there 
are other things in life to have fun with in the same time.

I wonder: who is in favour of the current approach? Who is not in favour? 
Could this be agreed on to be changed?

Cheers
Friedrich




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