Jeroen Demeyer wrote: > I have seen multiple discussions where somebody wants to deprecate a > useless function but somebody else complains that we cannot do that > because the function in question cannot be removed (because of backwards > compatibility). See https://bugs.python.org/issue29548... for an > example. > We currently have a deprecation policy saying that functions deprecated > in version N cannot be removed before version N+2.
Do we have that officially written down anywhere? The closest I know is https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0387/ but that PEP is still a draft. And for me the "official" policy is if you deprecate in N you can remove in N+1, not N+2. (But all of this is a bit wonky with Python 2.7 still being alive and not being able to remove anything from the stdlib unless it's severely broken until 2.7 hits EOL). > That's a reasonable > policy but some deprecation purists insist that it MUST (instead of MAY) > be removed in version N+2. Following this reasoning, we cannot deprecate > something that we cannot remove. > Personally, I think that this reasoning is flawed: even if we cannot > remove a function, we can still deprecate it. That way, we send a > message that the function shouldn't be used anymore. And it makes it > easier to remove it in the (far) future: if the function was deprecated > for a while, we have a valid reason to remove it. The longer it was > deprecated, the less likely it is to be still used, which makes it > easier to remove eventually. > So I suggest to embrace such long-term deprecations, where we deprecate > something without planning in advance when it will be removed. This is > actually how most other open source projects that I know handle > deprecations. > I'd like to know the opinion of the Python core devs here. I prefer removal for ease of maintenance (people always want to update code even if it's deprecated), and to help make sure people who don't read the docs but discover something via the REPL or something and don't run with warnings on do not accidentally come to rely on something that's deprecated. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/PRI2O6G6O6HUVGXD3W2MSCEF4JTW36IB/
