Adds Deprecation Shaking

text/0000-deprecation-shaking.md

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+- Start Date: 2019-12-17
+- Relevant Team(s): Ember.js, Ember Data, Ember-CLI
+- RFC PR: (after opening the RFC PR, update this with a link to it and update the file name)
+- Tracking: (leave this empty)
+
+# Deprecation Shaking
+
+## Summary
+
+Allow applications and addons to eagerly opt-in to "shaking" deprecated
+features, removing them from the builds of apps that do not use them.
+
+## Motivation
+
+Ember has always had strong guarantees around semver compliance and a solid,
+stable upgrade path for every major change it makes. This has, over time, led
+to a large amount of extra code that exists in the framework - code that is
+marked for removal in the future, but can't be removed immediately due to those
+guarantees.
+
+This is especially true now that with Octane, which includes a large new set of
+features that were ultimately designed to completely replace lots of older
+features. Classic features aren't deprecated yet, but at some point in the
+future they likely will be, and being able to take advantage of those size
+reductions as they come would be a huge selling point for Ember apps.
+
+## Detailed design
+
+This RFC proposes allowing users to specify deprecation compliance for both apps
+and addons via a field in the `ember` property in `package.json`:
+
+```json
+{
+  "ember": {
+    "edition": "octane",
+    "deprecationCompliant": {
+      "ember-source": "3.15.0"
+    }
+  }
+}
+```
+
+Deprecation compliance can be specified for any Ember addon, including
+`ember-source`. Specifying compliance for a particular version of an addon means
+that the consuming app/addon will function without triggering any deprecations
+that were added in or prior to that version. Specifying the version number will
+turn all deprecations before the version into _assertions_ when running in DEBUG
+mode, preventing users from relying on the behavior altogether, but still
+providing a helpful error message in those cases. In production builds of
+`ember-source`, the features will be removed as possible, but they are not
+guaranteed to be removed fully.
+
+The `deprecationCompliant` field must be an exact, existing version of the
+addon. New applications and addons will have `deprecationCompliant` set to the
+latest version of `ember-source` and `ember-data` once the feature has landed.
+
+Ember's `deprecate` method will receive two new arguments that allow it to
+participate in this system:
+
+```ts
+interface DeprecationOptions {
+  id: string;
+  until: string;
+  since: string;
+  source: string;
+  url?: string;
+}
+
+declare function deprecate(message: string, test?: boolean, options?: DeprecationOptions) => void;
+```
+
+`since` must be a SemVer version equal to or lower than the current version of
+the library. `source` must be the name of the library that is creating the
+deprecation. If either of these options is missing, then the deprecation will
+not be affected by any settings for deprecation compliance in consuming
+applications. Not including these options will be deprecated and issue a
+warning.
+
+### Dependencies
+
+Apps and addons may depend on other addons that are not yet deprecation
+compliant with a given version. If the parent app or addon has a more recent
+version of a library specified, an error will be thrown, alerting the user of
+the addon that is not compliant. The user can then lower their deprecation
+compliance version to match the addon if they choose, but they _cannot_ override
+the compliance versions of their dependencies, since there is no way for us to
+know whether or not the feature is used and will cause errors otherwise.
+
+If an addon does not specify a deprecation compliance version, then it will be
+assumed to be compliant.
+
+### A Note on Per-Feature Shaking and Optional Features
+
+An [earlier version of this feature](https://github.com/emberjs/rfcs/issues/532)
+proposed allowing users to specify which features they wanted to disable
+explicitly. The thinking was that this would prevent deprecations from being
+blocked on each other, and enable more aggressive deprecation timelines in
+general.
+
+However, attempting to do this in a generic way would have resulted in a
+combinatorial explosion of possible deprecations that could interact with one
+another. If a user chose, for instance, to enable shaking for observers, but not
+for computed properties, we may not actually be able to know if we could safely
+shake all of the related code, since they share a lot of the same
+infrastructure. It would also be very difficult to _test_ all possible
+combinations of enabled/disabled deprecations. Shaking all deprecations prior to
+a minimum version gives us one target combination, which is much easier to
+reason about internally, and much easier to test.
+
+Instead, we can use Ember's existing **optional features** infrastructure to
+allow users to disable larger, more embedded features within Ember eagerly.
+Optional features are generally reserved for larger shifts in Ember's behavior,
+so there are fewer combinations to test compared to deprecations, which are used
+for large and small things.
+
+Optional features also send a better signal to the community. Major features
+like Classic classes, observers, and computed properties can first go through a
+period of being optional, before eventually being deprecated, and then removed.
+Transition to an optional feature is a signal that the feature will eventually
+be removed, but not in the near future, so it's not an
+upgrade-now-or-forever-be-stuck-on-the-last-major-version-of-Ember level
+priority. The feature can be converted to a true deprecation when the community
+is ready and most apps and addons have converted to new idioms.
+
+## How we teach this
+
+This should be included in a guides section on performance and build size. It's
+an advanced topic, so it should not be placed in a section aimed toward
+beginners.
+
+### API Docs
+
+#### `deprecationCompliant`
+
+This option specifies the versions of libraries that the application or addon is
+_deprecation compliant_ with. Deprecation compliance means that the app/addon
+does not use any features that have been deprecated on-or-before that version,
+and does not trigger any warning messages when run.
+
+```json
+{
+  "ember": {
+    "edition": "octane",
+    "deprecationCompliant": {
+      "ember-source": "3.15.0"
+    }
+  }
+}
+```
+
+Telling Ember the version that the app/addon is compliant with will cause all
+deprecations for that library prior to the specified version to throw errors
+instead of warnings in development builds. Libraries may also attempt to remove
+that code whenever possible in production builds, slimming down the final build
+and app size.
+
+`deprecationCompliant` should be set to an object whose keys are the names of
+packages that the app/addon depends on, and whose values are the exact SemVer
+version that the app/addon is compliant with.
+
+##### Dependencies
+
+The deprecation compliant version of an app/addon cannot be greater than any of
+their dependencies compliant versions. Ember CLI will throw an error if it finds
+that one of your dependencies has an older version, and will let you know what
+version you can lower your own compliance to.
+
+If a child addon does not specify compliance for a given library, it is assumed
+to be compliant, and will not cause errors at build time. The library may still
+not be compliant however, and could cause assertions to be thrown, so you should
+be aware of this and report the issue to the library directly if this occurs.
+
+## Drawbacks
+
+- This increases complexity for addon authors, who will likely receive pressure
+  to update their compliance more frequently from apps that make use of these
+  features.
+
+## Alternatives
+
+- A "flag" version of deprecation shaking, where users decide which features to
+  disable and attempt to shake. This has several problems, which are covered
+  above in the Detailed Design section.
+
+## Unresolved questions
+
+- Should `ember-cli-update` attempt to automatically update the compliant
+  version?
+- Should Ember provide any utilities for checking and shaking deprecated
+  features at build time for other addons?