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lcm-proj / lcm

Lightweight Communications and Marshalling
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
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Mark C# and Go and as Unmaintained #423

Closed nosracd closed 1 year ago

nosracd commented 1 year ago

More official notice for this comment.

tprk77 commented 1 year ago

So before you go ahead and deprecate these bindings, I think you should state why they are being deprecated. I see the linked comment for the Go binding, but no information on the C# binding. Also, I'm not sure if you're aware of this but LCM does have two (mostly inactive) mailing lists:

I think you should notify these lists before you start deleting code. It might also be useful to ask these lists if anyone is actually using these bindings, and if anyone is willing to maintain them.

Anyway, I am not really familiar with the C# binding, but I think it would be kind of a shame to get rid of it because it's been around since before 2009. I think it might make more sense to say "use at your own risk" and keep it archived in place. Then again, maybe that's what you mean by deprecation.

tprk77 commented 1 year ago

Link: https://github.com/lcm-proj/lcm/issues/370

kyonifer commented 1 year ago

I think it might make more sense to say "use at your own risk" and keep it archived in place. Then again, maybe that's what you mean by deprecation.

Yep, that is what we meant to say. Perhaps it would be more accurate to mark it "unmaintained" instead of "deprecated". There's no plan to remove any code from the tree at this point. But we thought it would be prudent to note somewhere that there is currently no maintainer for those targets. The hope is that such a note might get an interested party to step in and sign up to maintain them.

If it becomes clear at some point in the future that those targets are broken on modern systems and nobody has offered to fix them, it might make sense to pull them from the tree to not mislead people. But that isn't the situation yet.

So before you go ahead and deprecate these bindings, I think you should state why they are being deprecated.

If we note them as unmaintained instead that will hopefully be self-explanatory. Essentially "use at your own risk".

Also, I'm not sure if you're aware of this but LCM does have two (mostly inactive) mailing lists: I think you should notify these lists before you start deleting code. It might also be useful to ask these lists if anyone is actually using these bindings, and if anyone is willing to maintain them.

Thanks for the suggestion. We are aware of them, but planning to do most of the active development going forward on github. Making an announcement of that fact on the lists is a good idea though, as well as asking if there is any interest in maintaining those targets. We will do so.

nosracd commented 1 year ago

I've updated the phrasing to make it more clear that we're not planning on dropping these languages but no one has yet volunteered to keep them up.

tprk77 commented 1 year ago

For what it's worth I appreciate the change in wording!

The mailing lists are admittedly old-school. But LCM is an old project too. I think announcement about the project's future and what you're planning would make sense, if only to notify the project's "alumni." (Some of which might even be pre-GitHub.)

kyonifer commented 1 year ago

I think announcement about the project's future and what you're planning would make sense, if only to notify the project's "alumni." (Some of which might even be pre-GitHub.)

Agreed. I made a post earlier today along those lines, hopefully doing just that.