[Python-Dev] Breaking undocumented API

[Alexander Belopolsky]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 7:01 AM, Michael Foord
<fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk> wrote:
..
>> Is it OK to add __all__ to such modules that does not include all
>> names not starting with an underscore?  Is it OK to then remove names
>> that clearly were not intended to be public?
>
> Given the rules I suggested, which are basically the same as the one *you*
> are saying are already in place, if "import *" exports these names then you
> shouldn't change that behaviour without going through the deprecation
> process.

I don't dispute that these are *the* rules, but my question was
whether it is ok to break them in specific cases such as
trace.rx_blank.  If not, how can we deprecate trace.rx_blank which is
a regex constant?

Another specific case is token.main.  See <http://bugs.python.org/issue10386>.