On 18/02/2012 0.04, Nick Coghlan wrote:
On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Ezio Melotti<ezio.melo...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm assuming that eventually the module will be removed (maybe for Python
4?), and I don't expect nor want to seen it removed in the near future.
If something gets removed it should be deprecated first, and it's usually
better to deprecate it sooner so that the developers have more time to
update their code.
Not really - as soon as we programmatically deprecate something, it
means anyone with a strict warnings policy (or with customers that
have such a policy) has to update their code *now*. (Previously it was
even worse than that, which is why deprecation warnings are no longer
displayed by default).
The ones with a strict warning policy should be ready to deal with this
situation.
A possible solution (that I already proposed a while ago) would be to
reuse the 2to3 framework to provide fixers that could be used for these
"mechanical" updates between 3.x releases. For example I wrote a 2to3
fixer to replace all the deprecate unittest methods (fail*, some
assert*) with the correct ones, but this can't be used to fix them while
moving from 3.1 to 3.2.
For things that we have no intention of deprecating in 3.x, but will
likely ditch in a hypothetical future Python 4000, we'll almost
certainly do exactly what we did with Pyk: later in the 3.x series,
add a "-4" command line switch and a sys.py4kwarning flag to trigger
conditional deprecation warnings.
I think Guido mentioned somewhere that this hypothetical Python 4000
will most likely be backward compatible, so we would still need a
regular deprecation period.
So, assuming things continue as they have for the first couple of
decades of Python's existence, we can probably start worrying about it
some time around 2020 :)
What bothers me most is that a valid mechanism to warn users who cares
about things that will be removed is being hindered in several ways.
DeprecationWarnings were first silenced (and this is fine as long as the
developers are educated to enable warnings while testing), now
discouraged (because people are still able to make them visible and also
to turn them into errors), and on the tracker there's even a discussion
about making the deprecation notes in the doc less visible (because the
red boxes are too "scary").
See also
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2011-October/114199.html
Best Regards,
Ezio Melotti
Cheers,
Nick.
_______________________________________________
Python-Dev mailing list
Python-Dev@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
