Sort and copy results

[Kohei Yoshida]

On Thu, 2014-06-05 at 19:54 -0400, Robinson Tryon wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Kohei Yoshida
> <kohei.yoshida at collabora.com> wrote:
> > In Calc, you can go to Data -> Sort, and choose to copy the sorted
> > results to someplace else, rather than the default option of sorting in
> > place.
> 
> When we've deprecated/removed other features, how did we handle that
> that in the Release Notes? Did we just make a note about the removal
> and provide an alternate workflow?

Good question.  We really don't have a clear guideline on feature
deprecation, but when we did, we did normally say it in the release
notes, I think.  Though in earlier days we may have skipped it since it
was pretty much wild west back then.

But if we did that today, we would include that in the release notes.

> 
> >> > I'm just wondering if anyone would miss this feature if it got removed.
> >
> > ...
> > I'd like to know they still exist though, rather than speculating that
> > they still do.
> 
> Aside from clearly flagging this option as DEPRECATED in the UI and
> then waiting a couple of versions before completely removing it, I'm
> not sure of a great way for us to query our userbase. The enterprise
> users might be even harder to query, as they might not see any changes
> we make in 4.3 for quite some time.

What *I* normally resort to is to either disable the UI or hide it, and
see if someone reports it as a regression.  I did that once for
something else in the past (which it was argued that was still used in
the "enterprise").  So far I haven't come across a bug report claiming
it was gone.  It was done several major versions ago IIRC.

Either way, I really believe that we do have to be brave enough to
deprecate some less than useful features if it makes sense, else we'd
end up filled with tons of esoteric old-school features that nobody
could ever maintain, or hinders our growth.

Kohei