Deprecation

[Fact 1]: An example being VLC Media Player, VLC used to stand for 'VideoLan Client' and a 'VideoLan Server' was available as its co-feature.

[Fact 2]: Since merely renaming an item would break backwards compatibility, the existing name must be left in place.

[Fact 3]: The original name will likely remain indefinitely, but will be deprecated to encourage use of the newer, more consistent naming convention.

[Fact 4]: Some common cases are:

The feature has been replaced by a more powerful, alternative feature. For instance, the Linux Kernel to support older features. For instance, when [[Apple Inc. planned the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, it created a subset of the older system's API which would support most programs with minor changes.

[Fact 5]: computer software or authoring programs standards and documentation, the term is applied to software features that are superseded and should be avoided.

[Fact 6]: Although deprecated features remain in the current version, their use may raise warning messages recommending alternative practices, and deprecation may indicate that the feature will be removed in the future.

[Fact 7]: Standardization would result in the use of only one of the regional spellings throughout, and all occurrences of the other spelling would be deprecated.

A feature that once was only available independently is now combined with its co-feature.

[Fact 8]: An example would be an API that alternately used the spelling "color" and "colour".

[Fact 9]: Programmers who were, at the time, chiefly using Mac OS 9, could ensure that their programs would run natively on Mac OS X by using only the API functions in Carbon.

[Fact 10]: These can be the result of a lack of foresight, changes in nomenclature over time, or personal, regional or educational differences in terminology.

[Fact 11]: Both the client and server became available in the same package, and as such, getting one independently would be impractical.

How and When To Deprecate APIs from the JDK 5.0 Documentation

Detect deprecated functions A tool that discovers deprecated functions in any Windows native application or library.