There's a widespread view that a good way of deprecating something isto have the new version of your project emit warning messages when itruns across code using whatever you're getting rid of. The theory goesthat this is pretty harmless; the people using the to be removed featurewill get notified about the situation but can fix their code at relativeleisure, because things still work.

As a working Unix system administrator, allow me to disagree violently.To sysadmins, a program's output or its lack