Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Peter Maydell]

On Sun, 22 Mar 2020 at 15:29, Aleksandar Markovic
<address@hidden> wrote:
> If the "progress" (in the form of deprecation) is so impotrant, than the 
> authors should devise it so that there is no dammage to existing features, 
> and no adverse effects.
>
> In this light, perhaps in-tree builds deorecation is 5.0 is little premature.

The idea of deprecation is to give advance warning. So it's
better for our users if we announce it earlier, rather than
later. Strictly speaking our deprecation policy is for
user-facing features, not build-time stuff, where we are
less strict about how much notice we give people. But it
seems to me that if it's easy to give some advance notice
then why shouldn't we do so?

I agree that we should obviously make sure that everything
that currently assumes an in-tree build also works with an
out-of-tree build before we drop the support...

(Also, if we don't announce that we're planning to drop
support, nobody's going to report to us issues which
we need to fix :-))

thanks
-- PMM