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Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:15:01 +0800
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To: Antony Dovgal <tony@daylessday.org>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC: ext/mysql deprecation
From: aharvey@php.net (Adam Harvey)

On 12 November 2012 21:20, Antony Dovgal <tony@daylessday.org> wrote:
> While I fully understand the reasons behind this, I still believe this kind
> of thing should be done using the documentation only.
>
> Generating 'educational' notices will just annoy the end users and in 99%
> cases they can't do a thing about it -
> nobody's going to rewrite a large piece of legacy software just to make PHP
> happy.
>
> More notices doesn't necessarily mean less people are going to use
> ext/mysql,
> you can't hasten users to move if they don't really want to do it
> themselves.

I don't think the documentation is necessarily effective here,
particularly with functions that users tend to know by heart: to pick
on session_register() and friends as an example, it seemed like the
E_DEPRECATED notice added in 5.3.0 was the impetus for quite a few
people to come out of the woodwork on IRC and start asking about
$_SESSION, even though it had been listed as deprecated in the manual
for at least 12 months before that.

I'm not really convinced the average user ever looks at the manual for
things they know, truth be told.

Adam