[Python-Dev] PEP 3003 - Python Language Moratorium

[Brett Cannon]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 14:53, Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan at ochtman.nl> wrote:
> 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?

So you are basically asking for a moratorium on stdlib deprecations.
Considering how much was removed in Python 3 from 2.6 this is a really
minor worry. And the only deprecation that I can see potentially
coming down the pipeline is optparse for argparse and cProfile to help
finish PEP 3108.

And, as Jesse said in another reply, it would be nice to take this
time to reflect upon where we want the stdlib to go and to potentially
clear other things out. So I am -0 on this as leaving stuff in for an
extra release isn't going to kill us, but I would prefer to not put it
off.

-Brett