Deprecation of `DialContext` and `Dial` is not mentioned in 1.63.0 release notes about grpc-go

[aaronbee]

I don't think it was a good idea to deprecate Dial and DialContext. They are not niche APIs. They are used by literally every grpc-go client implementation; you can't implement a gRPC client without it dialing a gRPC server. By marking them deprecated you are asking every user to evaluate every use of Dial, see how it should be updated, and submit a patch to make the change. This is not a trivial amount of work when you consider the wide use of gRPC.

There are 178,000 open source imports of grpc and countless more inside proprietary code bases and basically all of them are using Dial, either because they provide a grpc client, or a grpc server and they have end-to-end testing. For any of those projects using standard linting tools their CI's are blowing up with deprecation warnings. My one organization's codebase has over 300 calls to Dial, mostly in test cases.

What I would rather see is continued support for Dial with perhaps a doc comment on why a user might prefer to use NewClient instead.

[dfawley]

What I would rather see is continued support for Dial

Dial support isn't going away, by the way. It will stick around.

Yes, there will be a linter warning if you run a linter that complains about your use of deprecated features. You should have a way to silence linters that you disagree with. That's a tooling problem, not a problem with our decision to deprecate this API. New users need to be funneled to NewClient instead, and Deprecated tags are how that is done.

[jon-whit]

Could the maintainer team as least suggest some replacements for usages of Dial(WithBlock()) or Dial(WithTimeout())? That's the main migration path that I see practically impacting most people affected by the deprecation cycle.

I'm not seeing a clear or elegant path to replacing that functionality with NewClient without adding a lot more boilerplate beyond what previously existed with Dial. Specifically, if a developer wants to wait for the connection state to be "Ready" and block until that is the case, what is the advisable way to achieve that with the new API patterns?

[dfawley]

https://go.dev/wiki/Deprecated

Sometimes an API feature such as a struct field, function, type, or even a whole package becomes redundant or unnecessary. When we want to discourage new programs from using it, we mark that feature “deprecated”.

In contrast to some other systems, an API feature being deprecated does not mean it is going to be removed in the future. On the contrary, Go 1 compatibility means the feature will be preserved in its deprecated form to keep existing programs running.

This all sounds WAI.

One thing we did get wrong according to this recommendation was to release NewClient at the same time as deprecating Dial/DialContext. We can un-deprecate for one release if it helps, but the decision is to call it deprecated to encourage the use of the new API.

[howardjohn]

Seems like this was only fixed in 1.63 but not in the new 1.64.0?

Was the issue that was fixed that it was undocumented, and now that it was noted in the release note the problem is solved? IMO that is not the issue, the issue is the deprecation to begin with. As #7090 (comment) notes, this will require 178,000 usages to be changed across the ecosystem.

If this issue was supposed to be scope only to "undocumented" and not "do not deprecate it" let me know and I can open a new issue or PR.

[pellared]

@howardjohn, the issue was only about missing docs. You should create a new one (or find an existing one) if you want to ask for "undeprecating" the deprecated API.

[dfawley]

@jon-whit

Have you seen https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/blob/master/Documentation/anti-patterns.md already?

You have a couple options for what you are asking for:

1. Keep using grpc.Dial. If your staticcheck/etc is complaining about using something deprecated, disable it.
2. Use grpc.NewClient followed by polling ClientConn.State() and WaitForStateChange(). https://pkg.go.dev/google.golang.org/grpc#ClientConn.WaitForStateChange This is what we do internally to support WithBlock and WithTimeout (made more complicated to handle other un-recommended options):

grpc-go/clientconn.go

Lines 266 to 290 in 24e9024

	for {
	s := cc.GetState()
	if s == connectivity.Idle {
	cc.Connect()
	}
	if s == connectivity.Ready {
	return cc, nil
	} else if cc.dopts.copts.FailOnNonTempDialError && s == connectivity.TransientFailure {
	if err = cc.connectionError(); err != nil {
	terr, ok := err.(interface {
	Temporary() bool
	})
	if ok && !terr.Temporary() {
	return nil, err
	}
	}
	}
	if !cc.WaitForStateChange(ctx, s) {
	// ctx got timeout or canceled.
	if err = cc.connectionError(); err != nil && cc.dopts.returnLastError {
	return nil, err
	}
	return nil, ctx.Err()
	}
	}