Today’s interesting Perl module of the Day: Devel::Deprecate by Curtis “Ovid” Poe.
Back in 2000, I started teaching a class called “Perl Saves the Day: Writing Small Perl Programs to Get Out of Big SysAdmin Pinches” which was essentially a class about Perl hacks and how to use them responsibly in System Administration. One of my slides was “How to Get Rid of Hacks,” which started with:
It can be hard. You may have to wait for the rewrite.
Step one: remember you did it.
- Go back and document the code after the crisis.
- Send yourself mail.
- Set up an AT job.
- Put it in your calendar.
Now there’s an even cooler way: Devel::Deprecate. Devel::Deprecate provides a deprecate() function that let’s you write code like this (to quote the doc):
deprecate (
reason => 'Please use the set_name() method for setting names',
warn => '2008-11-01', # also accepts DateTime objects
die => '2009-01-01', # two month deprecation period
);
deprecate() only comes into play when the code is run during a test (which you are writing, right?). Each time it is run under this condition (and only this condition, it never comes into play when the code is run outside of a test), it produces output that is crystal clear:
# DEPRECATION WARNING # # Package: Our::Customer # File: lib/Our/Customer.pm # Line: 58 # Subroutine: Our::Customer::name # # Reason: Please use the set_name() method for setting names # # This warning becomes FATAL on (2009-01-01)
After the due date, it blows up just as promised with an equally verbose message. Very cool.
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