Can you please briefly explain to a non-developer what the changes in deprecation handling in version 1.6 mean?

Very practically: I'm running a customized theme that I once built by tweaking an existing theme. It only works when the deprecated-functions extension is active.

Now that this extension itself is deprecated: Does that mean that anytime soon it will completely removed? hence: my theme won’t work anymore? And if so, is there a rough roadmap/timeline on when this will happen?

I hesitate from wasting time tweaking one of the existing themes to work for me in version 1.6 while these themes all are marked as deprecated as well. Is there a chance I can wait until there is a new standard theme for Zenphoto?

Thanks and kind regards
Franz

Deprecated functionality will generally be removed with the next major release unless specifially noted (as we did remove some in 1.6). So for the 1.x.x releases these all will still work unless some security or major bug discovery demands breaking changes.

However I recommend to always fix issues reported as you should not rely on deprecated funtionality at all. It will still take some time until we have that major release so especially if you like the theme you are using.

Thanks a lot, that makes it much easier.
I'm not clinging to my actual (old) theme but due to the lack of more modern alternatives, i.e. a theme developed for version 1.6/PHP8, I don't have much choice but to wait as my developer skills are far from being able to build my own theme from scratch while I'll have to update to PHP8 very soon.

but due to the lack of more modern alternatives, i.e. a theme developed for version 1.6/PHP8

All included themes are update for PHP 8 & Zenphoto 1.6 despite being deprecated.

Also are the "half official" themes like zpBase, zenji and libratus and also basically two third party themes have been updated meanwhile. I have just posted about that (having forgotten to publish the article last week…): https://www.zenphoto.org/news/third-party-theme-and-plugin-updates-for-zenphotocms-1.6/

:-) great, thanks!