Checking incubation status

[marcoscaceres]

Hi @clelland, me again 👋

Just checking to see how you think this incubation is going? I see some limited activity in the issues, but not a lot of traction (nor updates to the main repo for quite a few years).

Is this something you're still hoping to pursue or can this be archived?

[yoavweiss]

This is shipped in Chromium and hence shouldn't be archived (but should be labeled properly).

There was a vibrant discussion last TPAC where Deprecation Reports were pointed out as a solution to a very real problem. I also vaguely remember you mentioned after it that you'd look into interest on the Apple side :)

[marcoscaceres]

Yeah, that was my feeling too. This seemed generally useful.

Found it WebKit/standards-positions#59

I’ll follow up internally.

[clelland]

Hey @marcoscaceres :)

As @yoavweiss mentioned, we've shipped this for a bit in Chrome, and it's definitely seen quite a bit of use. Wwe've had developers confirm that it's helpful for discovering when they're using APIs or patterns that they would have otherwise had no idea were slated for removal.

I'm not sure which group or groups would be interested in picking this up if we move forward out of incubation. WebPerf owns the main reporting spec, but this report type doesn't seem like a great fit for their charter.

[karlcow]

@clelland do you have more details and examples how the DeprecationReportBody is being used currently?

[clelland]

I don't have anecdotes handy from real sites, but you can see the full list of features that will trigger these reports in this file in the Chromium source repo: deprecation.json5

Each of those associates a set of "use counters", which we use for measuring feature usage, with a deprecation. If a counter for a deprecated feature is triggered by a page, and reporting is correctly configured, then a report will be generated and sent.

The exact set of features varies over time, as new features are added to the list, and old ones are removed from the platform.