Remove deprecated method

[MGaetan89]

These methods were supposed to be removed in older versions of Robolectric:

Symbol	Target removal version	Open Source usages
ConfigMerger	4.3	usages
RobolectricTestRunner.buildGlobalConfig()	4.3	usages
ServiceController.withIntent(Intent)	3.6	usages

Note: I've marked RobolectricTestRunner.CONFIG_PROPERTIES as deprecated, because it is no longer used in the project, but it's still public. Let me know if you want to proceed otherwise.

[utzcoz]

@MGaetan89 IIRC, many deprecated methods can not be deleted directly because widely used. Sorry about it.

[MGaetan89]

No worry. I saw that there are many deprecated methods in the projects, but only removed these because there is a removal version in te deprecation message.
If you prefer to keep them, feel free to close this PR.

[hoisie]

Thanks for doing this, I will take a closer look at this tomorrow.

[hoisie]

ServiceController.withIntent(Intent)

Looks like there are some tests at Google that are using ServiceController.withIntent(Intent) to deliver new intents to an existing Service object. This appears to be a valid testing use case and there does not appear to be an alternative API for this. This has also come up here as well: #3277 (comment).

Anyway, long-story short, we probably need to keep ServiceController.withIntent(Intent). Maybe we should just un-deprecate it. Thoughts @brettchabot and @utzcoz?

[hoisie]

RobolectricTestRunner.buildGlobalConfig()

Looks like this is used by Litho:

https://github.com/facebook/litho/blob/master/litho-testing/src/main/java/com/facebook/litho/testing/testrunner/LithoTestRunner.java#L80-L82

We should check if LithoTestRunner can be updated to remove that.

Other than these two, I am not seeing any compatibility issues.

[utzcoz]

@hoisie I recommend to clean-up remove time in comments instead of removing them. It's very hard to find all potential usages now. If we really want to remove them, we can remove them in multiple Robolectric versions but from deprecated first.

Maybe two years ago, I still want to clean-up these methods, but I found there were some important methods that marked by deprecated were used by many projects we can't provide alternative stable methods for them. I know it's great if we can let developers use standard APIs of Robolectric, instead of some helper methods like configuration APIs for purpose usage.

[utzcoz]

After reviewing code again, if we can confirm that we can use standard APIs to retrieve Display's metrics and real metrics, we can remove these two deprecated APIs first instead of full list that the current PR wants to remove.

[MGaetan89]

After reviewing code again, if we can confirm that we can use standard APIs to retrieve Display's metrics and real metrics, we can remove these two deprecated APIs first instead of full list that the current PR wants to remove.

I've tried to do just that (removing ShadowDisplay.getMetrics(DisplayMetrics) and ShadowDispaly.getRealMetrics(DisplayMetrics)), and keep everything else. But since these methods also alter the scaledDensity, I'd say that we need to remove ShadowDisplay.setScaledDensity(float) as well.
If I remove these three methods, the only change needed to make the tests pass is to remove the part changing the scaled density.

If that's fine by you, I can update this PR as explained. Otherwise, if the other methods need to be kept, I'd say that we can close this PR.

[hoisie]

I am OK with having a PR that removes all of the methods on ShadowDisplay

[hoisie]

If we really want to remove them, we can remove them in multiple Robolectric versions but from deprecated first.

These methods have been deprecated for years right?

In general I am OK with deleting things even if teams have to fix small things when they upgrade.

Robolectric has a MASSIVE public API surface and it's still growing. I think it's OK to be a little aggressive about removing stuff that has been deprecated.

People can always use previous versions for as long as they need.

[utzcoz]

@MGaetan89 If you would like, you can send a new PR to delete deprecated methods for ShadowDisplay only.

[MGaetan89]

Here's the PR to remove every deprecated methods in ShadowDisplay: #8840

These methods have been deprecated for years right?

All the methods were meant to be removed in Robolectric 3.7, which was released in 02.2018. So they've been deprecated for a few years now, yes.

[utzcoz]

In general I am OK with deleting things even if teams have to fix small things when they upgrade.

I agree with you that developers only need to modify small patch for a new version. But if deleted APIs are important configuration related APIs, it is always very easily. I have seen some people customize the Robolectric a lot based on these deprecated internal APIs.

The adaption might be easier if developers can replace it with other public APIs, but some APIs without replacements. If we delete the deprecated APIs, developers who use them need to delete related tests as they can't use other public APIs to make related tests work again.

[MGaetan89]

I've updated the description of the PR to includes links to usages of each deprecated method.
I've used GitHub's search and excluded HTML and Markdown files, to ignore documentation usages.