[stdlib-sig] standardizing the deprecation policy (and how noisy they are)

[Antoine Pitrou]

> Experience has shown that when people get used to seeing 'a bunch of
> warnings that don't really matter' they either a) turn them off or
> b) ignore them, even when they are telling them valuable things that
> they should be paying attention to.  So constantly spitting out
> DeprecationWarnings as soon as something becomes deprecated is a
> most excellent way to train people to ignore DeprecationWarnings.

Well at least people get a chance to see them. If some people think the
warnings are useless (even though the messages warn about removal of a
construct), they won't run a code checker either.

If Mercurial users and developers hadn't seen those warnings at all,
perhaps Mercurial would have continued using deprecated constructs, and
ended up broken when the N+1 Python version had been released. If even
an established FLOSS project such as Mercurial is vulnerable to this
kind of risk, then any in-house or one-man project will be even more
vulnerable.

Besides, do we have such a code checker that is able to find out
deprecated constructs (not talking about 2to3 here) ?