[Python-Dev] PEP 3003 - Python Language Moratorium

[Dirkjan Ochtman]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 10:35, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Longer term, a solution may be to extend the standard deprecation period
> one release and make pending deprecation warnings required rather than
> optional. That way, on the ball developers would have a full release to
> quash deprecation warnings before their users encountered them by default.
>
> That is:
>
>  Release X.Y: deprecated in docs, pending deprecation in code
>  Release X.Y+1: deprecated in code
>  Release X.Y+2: removed in code and docs
>
> (Or we could just make that the policy now and not do anything specific
> in relation to the moratorium and the standard library)

This sounds like an improvement for things like Mercurial, at least.
We did support 2.3-2.6 until relatively recently, and I think that's
hard to get around for software that actually has to work on the
user's box. This is a bit different from webapps, I suspect, where you
"only" have to support the servers, which you often have more control
over.

But supporting 4 releases in a row has been a bit of a PITA. Luckily,
we finally felt it was time to drop 2.3, so now we can make use of
luxuries such as subprocess... Still, supporting 3 releases seems
relatively common in the Python world (after all, parts of Zope still
require 2.4, I think), and so it would be nice if the stdlib moved a
little bit slower.

Cheers,

Dirkjan