[eclipse-dev] Overhaul of how JDT handles Deprecation

[Stephan Herrmann <stephan.herrmann@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

If you are dealing with deprecated code, please read this:

A few days ago we realized that JDT had some bugs and misconceptions relating to 
deprecation warnings. Bugs that existed since the day the annotation @Deprecated 
was introduced.

The primary message is: Annotating a type as @Deprecated does not automatically 
mark its members as deprecated, too. Since deprecation warnings are specified in 
JLS, we no choice but to fix our implementation to comply to the spec.

As you may have gotten used to the long-standing behavior, please have a look at 
the summary of all changes in this area as documented in this News entry:
	https://eclipse.dev/eclipse/markdown/?f=news/4.38/jdt.md#changes-concerning-deprecation-warnings

For those interested in the details of issues and PRs we have a summary in
	https://github.com/eclipse-jdt/eclipse.jdt.core/issues/4572

I am confident that the state achieved today is stable and more correct :)

thanks,
Stephan

PS: We hadn't planned this overhaul, so how did all this surface just now?

It started with what could be characterized as an accidental but incomplete bug 
fix. A fix that wasn't meant to affect deprecation at all, made some deprecation 
warnings disappear. That's when we realized that those warnings had been wrong 
in the first place. But other wrong warnings were still raised. So step by step 
the issue escalated, new warnings appeared in builds. Fixes started piling up.