Gary England - 2011-07-15 15:53:35
Years ago there was an informal axiom amongst OS and system software developers that once something was deployed, it could never be removed because someone "out there" might still be using it. As a result, much of what was in IBM's OS/360 in the 1960s was still in IBM's MVS thirty years later resulting in a bloated monster. This was really more important in the days when much of the code in use was written in assembler or COBOL.
Fortunately we abandoned, more or less, that idea because we had developed more fully the concept of abstraction layers that insulated the developer from changes lower in the abstraction stack.
When we are hit by deprecation issues, most likely it simply means that we are developing at a layer too low in the stack. At the application level I should only care about requesting the basic CRUD functionality and let the lower levels be concerned about how that should happen.
Having said that, I confess that all of my code currently will take a hit because I use the mysql interface instead of the mysqli interface. Either that or, as Manuel pointed out, I will be a very late-adopter of the php 5.x or 6.x that starts the mysql deprecation.
