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Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

>When we do decide to end support for an old version, we’ll announce that on our blog and via email.

Blogs/email shouldn't be the only channel. Announce the retirement date with an HTTP header right in the response. In this way, developers can create automated alerts about soon depreciation.

In other words, depreciation announcements should be machine-friendly, not just user-friendly.

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Author here. I think it's a pretty nice idea to include deprecation information in the response headers as another way to keep API integrators informed - alongside written forms of communication like blog posts, changelog entries and emails. We'll discuss that internally.

As @xavdid noted, the reality is that most people won't see these headers, but it's a nice power user feature.

I like the idea of this, but in practice, I'm not looking at responses for an API unless I'm actively developing on it. If I'm doing a maintain-occasionally project, then I'll never see the deprecation response. I'm also unlikely to set up an automated alert for a random API I used one time (tricky to do without external tooling, like Zapier). I'm much more likely to plug an email into a form, since that's all set up for me already.

That said, as long as there's multiple ways to get notified, more is probably better.

This is a neat idea. Are there examples of this in the wild?

Author here. We actually use deprecation headers in our GraphQL API.

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