[Python-Dev] PEP 3003 - Python Language Moratorium

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 23:05, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> I haven't seen substantial opposition against the PEP -- in fact I
> can't recall any, and many people have explicitly posted in support of
> it. So unless opposition suddenly appears in the next few days, I'll
> move it to the Accepted state next Monday.

Let me state first, I think the PEP is great, and I have no objection
to its current form.

I do have one qualm, where I wonder if the PEP shouldn't be a little
stricter. As a gentoo developer and Mercurial maintainer, most of the
pain in the recent migration towards 2.6 has not been in language
changes, but in the standard library. Unfortunately, it's exempt from
the moratorium in the PEP.

Which makes me wonder, why are we not adding another moratorium, on
deprecations in the standard library? In other words, let's not
deprecate things like md5 or sha or the popen family of functions, but
keep all of that as it is, for both 2.x and 3.x, so people can direct
their energy towards other things (hopefully porting their 2.x
codebase to 3.x).

The standard library has already been through a lot of evolution in
the 2.x to 3.x transition, so one might assume there's not a lot of
stuff in the 3.x stdlib that would need deprecation in the short term.
And for 2.x, well, I'd certainly hope we don't need to deprecate much
more there before it finally gets EOL'ed, so it should be a relatively
light maintenance load to bear.

Is this just crazy talk?

Cheers,

Dirkjan