User-configurable preference removal/deprecation policy
Panagiotis Astithas
I wanted to ask about our standard policy regarding the removal or
deprecation of user-configurable preferences. The reason I'm asking is
because of bug 644419[1], where I want to remove the devtools.hud.loglimit
preference, that "appeared" in Firefox 4, for controlling the number of
displayed messages in the console. In fact "appeared" is probably not the
right word, since it is not visible in about:config by default, and not
documented anywhere AFAICT, apart from the source code. Our (the devtools
team) plan is to replace it with four separate knobs, one for each logging
category.
The question is, can we just kill it, or should we provide a deprecation
period, where both the old and the new knobs are available? Should that
period extend to infinity? The problem with deprecation in this case is that
there are some thorny issues regarding the combined behavior of these knobs
(who takes precedence, etc.), so a simple removal seems to make sense, if
possible.
Thanks,
Panos
Johnathan Nightingale
Based on the above, my personal take is that we kill it with fire. Would be interested to know how universally held that belief is, but if we can't kill an undocumented, invisible, expensive to maintain pref then what can we ever kill?
J
---
Johnathan Nightingale
Director of Firefox Engineering
joh...@mozilla.com
Rob Campbell
That was my gut-feeling as well.
I think +2 should be enough for this? :)
~ rob
Dave Townsend
feeling nice migrate the value to the new preferred.
> dev-apps-firefox mailing list
> dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-apps-firefox
Gavin Sharp
<dtow...@oxymoronical.com> wrote:
> If you're feeling nice migrate the value to the new preferred.
But don't do that in this specific case - just kill it :)
Gavin
Panagiotis Astithas
OK, death it is then!
Thanks,
Panos