[Dune] Removal of deprecated VTKOptions

[Markus Blatt]

Hi Robert,

nice to hear from you. Hope you are doing OK.

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 08:30:31PM +0200, Robert Kloefkorn wrote:
> Christoph did the correct thing by removing the deprecated VTKOptions
> class after the release and I hereby thank him for all the work that he
> has been doing lately to improve the code quality of DUNE. There is
> absolutely no need to have an additional announcement for removing
> deprecated classes, big change or not. Next time we'll have to fill a
> form or what? 
> This is exactly the right way to get people less and less
> interested in investing time into something like DUNE.
> 

Let's not exaggerate. Nobody said something about filling the form.

Fortunately, DUNE is in a state where there are users that people
investing time should care about, too. We already implemented some
utilities to help them. Deprecations with meaningful messages and
proper documentation are such a thing. Unfortunately, removing
deprecated methods/classes also removes theses messages and
instructions on how to prevent them/move to the new
interface. Therefore we should take good care to 
put everything into the recent changes. Just like Christoph did. The
problem is that these have to incorporate all the information needed
to move to the new interface. Which was not the case here because both
the class name _and_ some members were renamed. Probably many previous
times, too.  

But users need a detailed description about
the migration path. This saves them time and because of lesser
complaints/question it even saves the developer's time, too.

> From the people complaining nobody mentioned so far that the
> DUNE_DEPRECATED tag for the VTKOptions class did not work at all. The
> deprecation was there for a long time an nobody noticed. So if somebody
> should be blamed then the one you implemented this deprecation tag
> without checking that it works correctly. On the other hand this problem
> is just to unimportant to care about it. By the way in dune-fem it was
> two or three lines to change at it took about 5 min. So what's the big
> fuzz all about?

5 minutes for three lines and I consider you as an expert. For me this
took longer. Imagine howmuch time this is for a regular user and maybe
15 lines. 

> 
> People that are not satisfied with these problems that occur from time
> to time in the trunk can stick with the release and they won't stumble
> upon these things.

IMHO in this particular case this just moves the problem into the
future and chances are the awareness for the change is even lesser on
both the developer and user side.

Just my two cents,

Markus

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