My suggestions are:
1) don't deprecate anything;
2) cross-reference and index the manual extensively, indicating what opcodes
are recommended or not, and the reason why.

Deprecation seems only, in practice, eliminating the description of an
opcode from the manual, not an opcode from the distribution. (And of course
one possible solution to "opcode bloat" - which I too deplore, is to build
special-purpose Csounds with different collections of opcodes - including
minimal distributions.)

The problem with deprecating any opcode from the manual, is that there is no
way of understanding/studying the deprecated opcode in an older composition.

Also, to the extent that opcodes are actually different from one another,
there are good reasons for using them all - different features, simpler,
more self-explanatory, etc. If any are identical (except in name), they
should occupy the same manual page with an indication of the preferred name
(and why). If they are broken, they should either be fixed, or an
explanation added as to what doesn't work (the opcode may be good for some
purposes but not for others).

Many of the questions on this list are: "What opcode, if any, does such and
such?" Someone (often Victor) comes up with the answer - usually with an
opcode name that I might never have thought of, or heard of. More powerful
searching, cross-referencing with feature comparisons, within our Csound
manual is the answer here.

A bit more plain language would help too. Terms like "FLTK", "fof", "fluid",
"pvs", "hrtf", "hetro", "x-class" and "chebyshevpoly - Efficiently evaluates
the sum of Chebyshev polynomials of arbitrary order" make the newbie's (and
my) eyes glaze over.

Art Hunkins

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Victor Lazzarini" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2015 9:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Csound] Csound Manual and Deprecations


My suggest would be to suppress, and add a parameter to -z to list all.
========================
Dr Victor Lazzarini
Dean of Arts, Celtic Studies and Philosophy,
Maynooth University,
Maynooth, Co Kildare, Ireland
Tel: 00 353 7086936
Fax: 00 353 1 7086952

> On 12 Oct 2015, at 14:41, jpff  wrote:
>
> It would be "easy" to mark depreated opcodesvin the -z output.  So do we
> supress them or tsg them with some charater, or a separate lisrt?
>
> ==John ff
>
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