Hey @Learner
Don’t worry. We won’t remove such fundamental functionality.
The most positive way I can understand this, and the way I am proceeding about this is that the configurations noted above will not be removed and that the only thing disappearing will be the ability to directly declare dependencies for them. Instead we will continue to be able to declare that they extend from a custom configuration we define.
That is absolutely correct. If you want to declare something for “runtime only”, you should use runtimeOnly. If you want to resolve the complete runtime classpath, you should continue to rely on runtimeClasspath which will not go away.
Sorry if the wording is confusing. The concept of Configuration has evolved over time in Gradle and now there are basically three different usages of the Configuration concept:
https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/declaring_dependencies.html#sec:resolvable-consumable-configs
In the future we want to make these distinctions clearer and also optimize the code behind it. That’s why the unwanted ways of using a certain configuration are deprecated now.