[Python-Dev] Deprecation policy

[Barry Warsaw]

On Nov 28, 2011, at 03:36 PM, Petri Lehtinen wrote:

>Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>> That may serve a notion of tidyness or somesuch but in reality it is
>> a PITA for users making it more difficult to upgrade python versions
>> and making it more difficult to use published recipes.
>
>I'm strongly against breaking backwards compatiblity between minor
>versions (e.g. 3.2 and 3.3). If something is removed in this manner,
>the transition period should at least be very, very long.

+1

It's even been a pain when porting between Python 2.x and 3.  You'll see some
things that were carried forward into Python 3.0 and 3.1 but are now gone in
3.2.  So if you port from 2.7 -> 3.2 for example, you'll find a few things
missing (the intobject.h aliases come to mind).

For those reasons I think we need to be conservative about removing stuff.
Once the world is all on Python 3 <wink> we can think about removing code.

Cheers,
-Barry