[Python-Dev] @deprecated (was: Useful thread project for 2.5?)

[Guido van Rossum]

> This is a recipe for disaster. Creating a new function from the old can have
> unwanted side effects, since you effectively change the object. For example,
> if someone is monkey patching this function, then the deprecation warning
> gets lost.

That's a rather extreme use case, and not one that IMO should block
the @deprecated decorator from being used. I hope that monkey patching
is rare enough that you shouldn't mind checking once a year of so if
the thing you're monkey-patching might have been deprecated (in which
case you shouldn't be monkey-patching it but instead rewrite your code
to avoid it altogether).

> In Zope 3's deprecation package, we have decided to put a special deprecation
> proxy around the module (instead of the function) and register a list of
> attribute names (note that it does not matter whether its a class, function
> or other type of object) that are deprecated. The advantage is that you get a
> deprecation warning just by looking up the object.

Yeah, but not everybody has Zope's proxying machinery.

I think you're overreacting.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)