Hi, and happy new year! I wonder under what conditions there should be a deprecation warning before removing a method: Can one do without a deprecation warning, if the method does not really provide an apparent functionality? Or would we argue: It is theoretically possible that some third-party code uses it in some way, and hence there *must* be a deprecation warning before removing a method?
The reason (or use case) for my asking is as follows: At sage-algebra, http://groups.google.com/group/sage-algebra/browse_thread/thread/3e2ca2a8be1a3a23 , there currently is discussion about how to test that something is a morphism in a category, and it also contains a discussion on the meaning of "X in C" for a category C: * Should it return True only for objects, or also for morphisms (that's currently not the case)? * Do we really want that "X.category()" sometimes does *not* return a category containing X as an object? By consequence, we currently have sage: ZZ.hom([1]) in Rings().hom_category() True which seems strange, as ZZ.hom([1]) is an element of an object of Rings.hom_category(). There is a class SageObject, from which Element derives, and a class CategoryObject, that directly derives from SageObject and from which Parent derives. Clearly, CategoryObject should have a method category() -- but is there a reason why SageObject has a category()? What is the purpose of Element.category() returning the "category of elements of a parent" (a category with trivial morphisms, or what?), such as sage: 1.category() Category of elements of Integer Ring ? Niles found that removing SageObject.category() and Element.category() (which are different) is relatively harmless (of course, some tests fail, but apparently it would be easy to fix). Hence, it seems (at least to me) that SageObject.category() and Element.category() do not really provide a functionality. But perhaps someone here knows a reason for having them? I think that question should be answered on sage-algebra. But, what I'm asking here: If they really don't have a compelling reason to exist and if we decide to remove them: Should there be a deprecation warning, or not? Best regards, Simon -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
