Deprecation Severity Controls

Drake provides mechanisms to control the severity of deprecated API usage at both compile time and at runtime.

Compile time

To promote compile-time deprecation warnings to errors, build with -Werror=deprecated-declarations. To silence them, define the preprocessor symbol DRAKE_DEPRECATION_IS_SILENT.

Bazel (add to .bazelrc):

build --copt=-Werror=deprecated-declarations      # promote to error
# or:
build --copt=-DDRAKE_DEPRECATION_IS_SILENT        # silence

CMake:

add_compile_options(-Werror=deprecated-declarations)   # promote to error
# or:
add_compile_definitions(DRAKE_DEPRECATION_IS_SILENT)   # silence

Runtime

Runtime deprecation warnings can be controlled via the DRAKE_DEPRECATION_RUNTIME_SEVERITY environment variable:

• "error" — deprecation warnings are thrown as exceptions instead of logged.
• "ignore" — deprecation warnings are silently discarded.
• unset — deprecation warnings are logged normally.

Setting the variable to an unrecognized value causes a one-time warning and falls back to the default behavior.

This setting governs all Python deprecation warnings, and a small percentage of C++ deprecation warnings that cannot be expressed at compile-time.