Re: open-{gnutls,network}-stream backwards compatibility

[Robert Pluim]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden
>> Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2019 19:18:26 +0000
>> 
>> EZ> If we can make the change backward-compatible, there's no reason to
>> EZ> deprecate it.
>> 
>> As the author
>
> I appreciate your authorship, but in Emacs, once we release our code,
> we no longer have much of control on it.  It's out in the open.
>
>> I think there is: the function is used in one place and
>> doesn't fit the use cases well. All the existing usage goes through
>> `open-network-stream'. So it's a layer of indirection with one user,
>> that removes API features in a way that's hard to work around. I think
>> it's better to remove the source of the problem than to patch it.
>
> I don't think I understand why this justifies deprecation of an API.
> Deprecation is a nuisance: it chatters when you compile code, it nags.
> We need a seriously good reason to impose that on unsuspecting users.

I see no need to deprecate it. It would be easy enough to leave it in
place, and move a (modified) version of it inline into
network-stream-open-tls. That would avoid any backward compatibility
issues as, and allows network-stream-open-tls free to add
functionality as needed.

Robert