Rakudo build broken as of parrot RELEASE_2_10_1-633-ga3ca6c8

[Andrew Whitworth]

Several functions were renamed by GCI students to help get TT #443.
It's a deprecation item that has been eligible to be changed since
1.4.

I'm not against keeping the old names around (as macros) to help ease
the transition in theory. In practice, where do we draw the line?
There has already been almost 2 years notice that the change would be
coming. We've followed all the deprecation policy guidelines and
waited plenty of time after eligibility to make these changes. How
long do we need to keep exporting those names for the purpose of
easing the transition? Forever?

I'm not trying to be facetious, I really do want to know for future
reference what people expect to happen when we make a C-level API
change like this. There comes a point in the process when we need to
stop offering the old function and start expecting people to be using
the new version. Knowing when that point should be is going to be
extremely important for us in the coming months, so we should figure
it out now.

I'm happy to put together a patch for Rakudo tonight. I can get
started on that soon. I'm also happy to continue supporting the old
name of this function as a macro if we have a clear plan for when such
a duplicate should be offered and for exactly how long. Saying that
we're going to backwards-support all C-level function interfaces
forever is really not something I would support.

The function in question has been renamed to
Parrot_hll_get_ctx_HLL_namespace, for reference.

--Andrew Whitworth



On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Andy Dougherty <doughera at lafayette.edu> wrote:
> Rakudo won't build with the current parrot master.  The first error
> message is about the function 'Parrot_get_ctx_HLL_namespace'.  Were some
> functions renamed?  If so, the old names should still be kept around as
> wrappers for the new names, at least for a while.
>
> (Breakage like this makes it really hard to reliably bisect for important
> changes.)
>
> --
>    Andy Dougherty              doughera at lafayette.edu
> _______________________________________________
> http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
>