Close the loop on exercise deprecation

[kytrinyx]

We have had a bunch of conversations about deprecating exercises across many different repositories and issues. I believe we've figured out how to deal with it, but it's undocumented and incomplete.

Would someone volunteer to take responsibility for completing the current work on deprecation?

The primary responsible party (PRP) doesn't necessarily have to do all the work, but would help figure out exactly what needs done, and then drive it to completion.

I think this would involve the following steps:

• go through Formalize the process for deprecating exercises #40 and reading all the issues that are linked from that page
• list out who has been involved in the discussions—these are the people to @-mention with questions when you are unsure how to move forward
• document exactly what was decided and how deprecation now works (here in the issue is fine; writing a more official bit of documentation in https://github.com/exercism/exercism.io/tree/master/docs is much easier once we have collected the information in one place)
• figure out which exercises are deprecated, and what needs to be done to get the deprecation completed across all the tracks
• make a plan and suggest it here
• (then probably) create individual issues for specific tasks that can be tackled

There are also folks hanging out in https://gitter.im/exercism/dev who can probably help puzzle things out.

[SarahDHealey]

@kytrinyx I am willing to take this on and to work through the steps outlined above. Please note: I do not have any prior experience in documentation.

[kytrinyx]

@SarahDHealey Awesome! If you have questions or get stuck or just feel like you need to think out loud, do not hesitate to holler or post comments here as you go along.

This is the first time I've made a "detective work needed" issue, so I'd be excited to hear how it goes and what we could do better next time to make it easier for someone to tackle.

[SarahDHealey]

@kytrinyx Thanks! I will take it on and start organizing. I'll keep you posted and holler out when I get stuck or run into issues.

[kytrinyx]

@SarahDHealey just checking in to see how you're doing on this. Any initial thoughts about what you've found so far?

[SarahDHealey]

Here is the spreadsheet that I put together with the conversations, will need to keep going to document all of them: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1StkN65SJckvfPZU-tw-N0YjjiEamuV-zkCwEZBEH08w/edit?usp=sharing

[SarahDHealey]

I've got another summary going here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10kUdbPCT7zBJ1QydHFQouIZa-DH7zHuBH3n7iCgEojo/edit?usp=sharing
So far, it has still been just notes and wrapping my head around it. I'll be working more on the documentation today and through the weekend. My thoughts are to document 1. the steps for the name change. 2. the steps for how hamming was deprecated and 3. If all-your-base was deprecated, how the steps were taken to deprecate all-your-base.

[kytrinyx]

@SarahDHealey This is so good!

One thing to note is that all-your-base is the replacement that deprecates the four similar exercises: binary, trinary, octal, and hexadecimal. So all-your-base isn't deprecated.

[jtigger]

Wow, this is a really thorough treatment of the topic, @SarahDHealey ! Thanks for taking the time to amass all this!

I have a general question: do we every truly want to allow an exercise's identity to be mutable? This comes-up prominently in the "Change Name" scenario. What would happen if we consider an exercise, despite its near identical content to another exercise merely as a new one? Old submissions stay with the old exercise; new stay with the new.

[kytrinyx]

What would happen if we consider an exercise, despite its near identical content to another exercise merely as a new one? Old submissions stay with the old exercise; new stay with the new.

That would be much cleaner. We could give people access to both if they do either of them (some sort of cron job. Maybe not indefinitely). Or have @rikki- post a comment about the deprecation on all the submitted old ones saying "hey, rework this and submit to..."

[kytrinyx]

We've got this sorted with the new site. Closing! Thanks y'all.