Re: removing older deprecated functions

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Jan-2010, Dupuis wrote:

| To me, the concern is to still be able to revive old scripts that you didn't
| use since a long time. If some function has been obsoleted, it should be
| easy to find what the substitute is. So maybe this obsolete package could
| contain stubs, i.e. short scripts telling that some function is obsolete and
| what the replacement is. Eventually, they could be arranged in such a way
| that the required operation is performed by calling the updated function.

Every one of the deprecated functions has a warning like this:

  persistent warned = false;
  if (! warned)
    warned = true;
    warning ("Octave:deprecated-function",
             "weibpdf is obsolete and will be removed from a future version of 
Octave; please use wblpdf instead");
  endif

so since 3.0.0 was released, these functions have been warning that
their use is obsolete, that they will be remove, and what function to
use instead.

So I'm in favor of removing them.  But if you want to keep them around
because you think there is still code that uses the old names and that
you don't think people will want to update, then I think the best
option is a package of obsolete functions.  But I don't really want to
maintain that, so if you or someone else wants that, then I hope a
volunteer will step forward to create and maintain the package.

We can also add a chapter to the manual with a list of functions that
have been removed, in what version the function was removed, and what
the recommended replacement is.

jwe