[m-dev.] for review: remove Prolog support

[Fergus Henderson]

On 15-Mar-1999, Peter Schachte <schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 13, 1999 at 01:34:07PM +1100, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> > On 11-Mar-1999, Peter Schachte <schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > > I don't have any objection, however I think it's good form in such
> > > things to warn ahead of time that support will be removed.
> >
> > I think that that is a good general policy.
> > 
> > However, in this particular case, I think it is best to just remove
> > the feature now.
> 
> Those are good technical arguments.  However, if one views Mercury
> users as "customers," I think one must be careful about the mental
> model they develop of how the Mercury system is evolving.  If you're
> going to just yank support (which I agree is technically a sound
> idea), I think you should include a message reaffirming the usual
> policy of warning before removing things and explain why you have not
> followed that policy this time.

Yes.  The diff I posted yesterday included the following addition to
the NEWS file:

+  (Normally we would try to warn if any feature is to be removed at least
+  one release in advance.  However, in this case a simple work-around is
+  possible: in the unlikely event that anyone happened to have any makefiles
+  or scripts that depended on this support, they can install the latest
+  Mercury distribution and still continue to use the Prolog support from
+  Mercury 0.8, just by including the `bin' directories for both versions
+  in their PATH, with the more recent one first, of course.)

Do you think that is sufficient explanation?

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.