Deprecate app.all('/*', fn)

[dougwilson]

This is an idea to deprecate and display a message when someone adds the route .all('/*', fn) (part of the preparation for #2173). The * at the end syntax is going away, and this specific case with .all is a prime thing to start yelling at people about now in 4.x since it makes no sense. I can't imagine a reason they wouldn't want .use(fn), except for mis-understanding.

[jonathanong]

a whole list of practices we could think of that makes us go "WTF r u doing?" would be nice as error messages i think. can't cite any examples though

[defunctzombie]

I think this goes down a potentially bad road of tons of random code to catch cases we don't normally care about but with the downside of potentially preventing someone from experimenting with something.

[dougwilson]

I'm not sure about @jonathanong 's comment, but the intent of the original issue here is because the new path-to-regexp does not support the trailing * syntax, and we need to come up with a way to add deprecation warnings for this stuff, but can only add a warning if there is actually an alternative--this specific .all case does have one.

[dhigginbotham]

There's probably one or two valid use cases for .all('/*',...) but for the most part I really think that .use(...) is always a better solution -- however leave .[methodType]('/*',...) as is, so you don't have to involve method logic inside of your middleware. However, even then the argument is a toss-up because I really feel like it's a facade for .use(...) in the end... But, maybe not. 👍

[dougwilson]

There's probably one or two valid use cases for .all('/*',...) but for the most part I really think that .use(...) is always a better solution

There is no use-case, unless you want every OPTIONS request to your server to list every single method in the Allow response.

[dougwilson]

This was a stop-gap idea and is no longer necessary since I have a better way to go about adding deprecation messages to old path syntax. People are free to shoot themselves in the foot using app.all incorrectly :)