<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Oct 24, 2011, at 5:58 AM, Ezio Melotti wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; ">Hi,<br>our current deprecation policy is not so well defined (see e.g. [0]), and it seems to me that it's something like:<br> 1) deprecate something and add a DeprecationWarning;<br> 2) forget about it after a while;<br> 3) wait a few versions until someone notices it;<br> 4) actually remove it;<br><br>I suggest to follow the following process:<br> 1) deprecate something and add a DeprecationWarning;<br> 2) decide how long the deprecation should last;<br> 3) use the deprecated-remove[1] directive to document it;<br> 4) add a test that fails after the update so that we remember to remove it[2];</span></blockquote></div><br><div>How about we agree that actually removing things is usually bad for users.</div><div>It will be best if the core devs had a strong aversion to removal.</div><div>Instead, it is best to mark APIs as obsolete with a recommendation to use something else instead.</div><div>There is rarely a need to actually remove support for something in the standard library.</div><div>That may serve a notion of tidyness or somesuch but in reality it is a PITA for users making it more difficult to upgrade python versions and making it more difficult to use published recipes.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Raymond</div></body></html>