Rails Custom Deprecation Notices

In Rails 3 you can use the : "deprecate" method from ActiveSupport:

class Example  def foo  end  deprecate :fooend

It will create an alias for your method and output a warning with a stack trace. You can also use parts of this functionality directly, e.g:

ActiveSupport::Deprecation.warn("Message")

It will output the stack trace along with the message.

Maybe:

def old_relationship  warn "[DEPRECATION] old_relationship is deprecated."  @old_relationshipenddef old_relationship=(object)  warn "[DEPRECATION] old_relationship is deprecated."  @old_relationship = objectend

Something along those lines for a relationship.

In the majority of cases, you can just raise a warning and call the new method.

class Example  # <b>DEPRECATED:</b> Please use <tt>good_method</tt> instead.  def bad_method    warn "`bad_method` is deprecated. Use `good_method` instead."    good_method  end  def good_method    # ...  endend

There are libraries or metaprogramming if you need or want to get fancier, but in general that's not a good route to go for something this simple. You should have a pretty good reason to introduce a dependency for something this simple.