heads up: strain and accumulate are scheduled for deprecation

[stkent]

strain, accumulate

Wasn't sure of the best way to raise awareness of this otherwise. We should focus efforts on other exercises in lieu of improving these ones.

[jtigger]

I see you're keeping an eye on x-common discussions! This is a really valuable thing to do! ;) Katrina is making a real go at delegating. There's a number of "Task Forces" that have kicked off and are clearly in full-stride in cleaning up the curriculum part of the platform.

[jtigger]

So, the course of action here would be to move these exercises into the deprecated section in the config.json. Did you want to ... fold... that in to #286 ?

[stkent]

Since list-ops is not available in this track yet (though close!), I think it would be good to keep them around a while longer?

[stkent]

Nice pun, it was not unnoticed :D

[jtigger]

Since list-ops is not available in this track yet (though close!)

painfully so! :) I'm so grateful to @javaeeeee's efforts there... it's really shaping up.

I think it would be good to keep them around a while longer?

Now, there you go making sense. :)

[jtigger]

#207 has been merged! 🎉

@stkent are you happy with the way this all unfolded (i.e. notifying the track that these two exercises were deprecated)? Or do you think we can improve on this (e.g. literally adding in a @Deprecateds throughout the test suite/example)?

[stkent]

I think that leaking this information into the tests/examples would be overkill; however, deprecation being signaled by what seemed to be an somewhat-offhanded remark made by @kytrinyx in a generated issue in an upstream repository doesn't seem to be ideally visible! If there's a change to explore here, I would think it would be figuring out how to make that sort of decision more widely knowable. (There may well have been prior upstream discussion about those exercises that I missed, in which case, forgive my lack of knowledge!)

[kytrinyx]

I think I have on my todo list somewhere to generate an issue for each track about deprecation of certain exercises, but everything's been a jumble for a while and I've lost track. I think those discussions happened in the x-common repository. I apologize for the confusion. I'd love it if we could lock down good procedures around all of this.

[stkent]

Generated issues would be perfect (from the POV of an actively-maintained track, at any rate)!

[kytrinyx]

I found:

• Formalize the process for deprecating exercises discussions#40
• Deprecate binary, trinary, octal, and hexadecimal in favor of new all-your-base exercise problem-specifications#279
• accumulate: confusion and unfortunate naming problem-specifications#129

I'll update the discussions one to ask if someone wouldn't mind taking charge of figuring out exactly what has been decided, and what still needs to be done, and making it so.

Update: ok, the new issue that defines TODOs is linked to from the bottom of exercism/discussions#40

[stkent]

@kytrinyx ❤️ thanks for doing that digging and centralizing!

[stkent]

I notice that none of those issues mention strain being deprecated in favor of list-ops; is exercism/problem-specifications#588 (comment) the canonical reference for that decision? If so I'll add it to exercism/discussions#40 exercism/discussions#120 for reference.

[kytrinyx]

Excellent find. I think that the comment you're referring to is the canonical reference (as much as we have one, anyway!)

[stkent]

Roger that; adding to exercism/discussions#40 exercism/discussions#120 as promised!