Deprecated functions - centralizing them to optionally not include.

[dimitre]

I'm thinking about deprecated functions and remembering some previous discussion in github and other means:

Personally I don't think deprecated functions should survive very long on the core (more than 1 year or a major release) but I know there are important downsides to it, like the books printed on OF - that is a good point

I'm wondering about moving all deprecated functions to an ofDeprecated.cpp / .h so it can be optionally not included.
This way we can have the OF backwards compatible and by choice we can disable all deprecated functions.
The good side of removing them is having a faster code completion, smaller code completion cache and a tiny bit faster compilation.

in the next image we can see ofRect function (deprecated almost a decade ago) on autocomplete.
thoughts? ideas?

[artificiel]

the reason I'm not against holding onto deprecations long-term is that it provides quick fixes when opening old projects. my personal use case is not to try to run projects from 2014 "as is", but i expect to open them in OF2023 and get quick hints about stuff that is gone. if the deprecations are removed, I will only get errors, no helpful guides.

the idea of segregating long-deprecated deprecations in an optional headers is interesting (due to dependencies it may need a -deprecated.h per actual .h?). so If you are in a project resurrection mode, you enable the flag until you fix all the deprecation warnings.

ideally the flag would be opt-in, so old projects includes old deprecations by default, but a newly created project defaults with OF_SUPPRESS_ANCIENT_DEPRECATIONS=1.