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Hi Juergen, Sean,

I definitely agree with needing to write down the policy and definitely any policy should include a deprecation time :)

Did you want to write up something and let us poke at it?

A couple of thoughts outside of a deprecation policy:

a) guarantee that the api itself won't go away, but could possibly be turned into a noop? (i.e. source compatibility)

b) versioning? (Should we add support for versioning in anyhow? Maybe a C API version 2 to start this off with?)

c) One of the big things appears to be the push and pull for "A C API for all C++ entry points" along with "We don't want to get locked into immobility because we have a C API for all C++ entry points". Perhaps part of this might be defining an actual stable set of things along with an unstable set of things?

What was the rest of your discussion on this? Any particular points you think the community would be interested in?

Just some random thoughts.

-eric

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 12:54 PM Sean Silva <chisophugis@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it makes sense to officially document this. It has apparently never graduated from being "tribal knowledge".

As far as the concrete details, I haven't thought too much, but the deprecation process you suggested makes sense to me.

-- Sean Silva

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 12:36 PM, Juergen Ributzka <juergen@apple.com> wrote:
Hi @ll,

a few of us had recently a discussion about how to manage the C API and possible policies regarding addition, maintenance, deprecation, and removal of API.

Even thought there is a strong agreement in the community that we shouldn't break released C API and should be backwards compatible, there doesn’t seem to be a developer policy that backs that up. This is something we should fix.

I was wondering what the interested parties think of the current approach and what could/should we improve to make the use and maintenance of the C API easier for users and the developers alike.

I was hoping we could also introduce a process that allows the removal of an API after it has been deprecated for a whole release and the release notes stated that it will be removed.

Thoughts? Comments?

Cheers,
Juergen
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