About package deprecation

Hi all,

 

As everyone knows, the BlueInk and GTRecorder packages have been removed
from Pharo8.0 quite rapidly
https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/5217.

And it breaks the loading of other projects on Pharo8.0, like Roassal2.

 

Some claims that those packages will not be deprecated because they are
loadable as it from another repository. Why not? So, I tried.

 

For BlueInk, no repository containing the sources has been indicated. And
not repository exists on github.

 

For the GTRecorder, the sources are there:
https://github.com/pharo-contributions/EventRecorder, according to
https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/issues/5232.

The problem is that the EventRecorder project does not contain exactly the
same classes, the prefix has been changed from GT to ER. So, any reference
to one of the classes of this project has to be changed…

In particular, we had to make this change to make it load correctly:
https://github.com/lifeware-sa/Roassal2/commit/78ce17bba98b89cb21a996cf8acaf
4e053ae082b (and we just have tried to load it so far).

 

 

I think that not only Roassal is using those dependencies (see there
https://github.com/search?o=desc
<https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=GTEventCollector&s=indexed&type=Code>
&q=GTEventCollector&s=indexed&type=Code and they are just public repos) and
migrating them to the latest version of Pharo will be more painful since we
need to fix the issue it immediately, or, wait that the maintainer of each
project provide a fix to bypass the issues.

 

 

Therefore, as we have a nice deprecation mechanism in our system, I suggest
we use it so we can focus on stuff more important than writing tons of
emails.

I am then pushing in favor of the integration of this PR:
https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/5257 so that we can have some
time to solve the bugs.

And I expect that those packages will be removed in Pharo 9.0.

 

 

Now that everything is exposed, could the maintainers of the Pharo project
take a clear decision concerning this topic? Also, we are expecting some
justification on the undertaken action.

 

 

Thanks,

Vincent

www.lifeware.ch <http://www.lifeware.ch>