[wp-hackers] Best practices for hunting depreciated functions.

[Claude Needham]

Recently I attempted my first plugin.
As part of the debugging process I turned on debugging so that I could
keep one ssh session open with a tail on the error log -- thus showing
me any errors and warnings.

To my surprise any warnings and/or errors generated by my fledgling
plugin were buried deep in a morass of warnings about depreciated
functions.

First of all let me say that the plugins I am using are pretty main
stream. These are plugins found on most of the "Top Ten" lists. I'm a
little disappointed that some of these plugins persist in using
functions depreciated many versions back. But that is not my question
at the moment.

My question here is about any tricks of the trade that folks use to
find where a function is actually being used. Most of the error
messages listing depreciated functions. Below are two examples of the
problem that I am running in to.

[Sun Apr 24 11:19:27 2011] [error] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] PHP Notice:
load_plugin_textdomain was called with an argument that is
<strong>deprecated</strong> since version 2.7 with no alternative
available. in /home/xxxx/public_html/wp/wp-includes/functions.php on
line 3389, referer:
http://www.xxxx.com/wp/wp-admin/plugins.php?activate=true&plugin_status=all&paged=1&s=

[Sun Apr 24 11:19:42 2011] [error] [client xx.xx2.xx.xx] PHP Notice:
get_bloginfo was called with an argument that is
<strong>deprecated</strong> since version 2.2! The <code>home</code>
option is deprecated for the family of <code>bloginfo()</code>
functions. Use the <code>url</code> option instead. in
/home/xxxx/public_html/wp/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3387,
referer: http://www.xxxx.com/wp/wp-admin/plugins.php?activate=true&plugin_status=all&paged=1&s=

I double checked wp-includes/functions.php and it is definitely not
using load_plugin_textdomain. :)  In order to find which plugin might
be using the depreciated function call it is necessary to grep my
entire tree looking for any occurrence. I can do this, but it seems
like there must be a debugging option available that would somehow
give a peek into the call stack or in some other way point toward the
function that contains the depreciated element.

Assuming that I find all the plugins that are generating the error
messages, is deactivation of these plugins the only means available to
clean up my error log so that it becomes easier to see those errors
and warnings generated by my code?

I'm assuming other developers have come up against these issues during
development. Hence, I'm assuming there must be standard practices for
dealing with this.

Regards,
Claude Needham