[geos-devel] deprecate non-thread-safe CAPI interfaces

[Howard Butler]

On Feb 11, 2010, at 11:36 AM, strk wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 09:42:56PM -0600, Howard Butler wrote:
>> 
>> On Feb 10, 2010, at 5:26 PM, strk wrote:
>> 
>>> I'd like to deprecate non-thread-safe version
>>> of CAPI interface in next release, and stop providing
>>> them for new methods.
>>> 
>>> If anyone sees a reason not to do that please scream
>>> before it's too late (you've plenty of time).
>> 
>> The proposal would be to stop providing new methods and method updates for the non-thread-safe API, correct? 
> 
> What I mean is that when *new* interfaces are added,
> only the version taking GEOSContextHandler would be provided.
> 
> And (I meant) all other ones not taking that handler would
> be marked with "deprecated" attribute so warnings come
> out at build time (only for GCC I know how..).
> 
> Can still wait for the second part (deprecation), but I
> think it makes sense for the first part (stop *adding*
> the bare ones).

Ok, that's maybe a good carrot, but we should still take care to treat the C API(s) very conservatively with respect to marking something deprecated.  I'd rather let the the non-threadsafe get decrepit through inattention than work too hard to pull the rug out from under someone.  Our promise with the C API is to do our best not to break your code by changing stuff.  We changed stuff (in parallel), but we're still going to support you for a while (undetermined amount of time).  Otherwise we risk being able to push out frequent-but-relatively-harmless updates/releases.

Howard