Scope
- Ongoing development means that features may eventually be replaced by alternative functions - i.e. they become deprecated.
- See Release Policy - Platform availability and support
- This article describes our policy for handling this situation and minimizing the implications this can have for users.
Life Cycle
Deprecated features will pass through three states:
DEPRECATED
- Deprecation announcements will be included with each release if applicable.
- Deprecated features will continue to be supported after the deprecation announcement, for the lifetime of the current release.
UNSUPPORTED
- End of support announcements will be included with each release if applicable.
- With the following release a deprecated feature becomes an unsupported feature, i.e. should problems occur then they will not be fixed.
- The functionality is still usable.
REMOVED
- Feature removal announcements will be included with each release if applicable.
- Unsupported features may be completely removed from future releases.
Example
- Lifecycle
- A feature is announced as being deprecated with release 1.8:
- This feature will still be included in all maintenance releases1.8.1, 1.8.2 etc.
- This feature will then be announced as being unsupported from release 1.9:
- This feature will still be included in all maintenance releases 1.9.1, 1.9.2 etc.
- Support will not be provided if an unsupported feature should break in a release 1.9 or later
- This feature may be removed in a subsequent release such as 1.10 or later.
- A feature is announced as being deprecated with release 1.8:
- Please note:
- The period between releases will usually be around three months.
- This means that you will have about six months to modify your configuration and to upgrade to replacement features.