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

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:03:33 EST, geremy condra writes:
>On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote
>:
>> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 3:44 PM, geremy condra <debatem1 at gmail.com> wrot
>e:
>>> the idea
>>> that we shouldn't put blinking lights and sirens on the crushomatic 90
>00
>>> because people might eventually ignore them doesn't strike me as being
>>> all that smart.
>>
>> I'm sorry, but you're really not getting the point. The crushomatic
>> already *has* a blinking light and a siren and everyone is *already*
>> ignoring them, because they go off all the time, whenever a person
>> gets closer than 6 feet. So we have no way to warn them when there
>> *really* is a danger, like when a person is about to put their hand
>> into the blender.
>>
>> The solution is to make the machine less dangerous (e.g. if you open
>> the lid the motor is cut off), not to argue that the siren is really
>> important.
>
>Rereading my post I don't see any place where I seem to have
>argued that deprecation warnings were "really important", but
>in case that's how it sounded, let me clarify: I don't think this
>argument is anything other than lots and lots of bikeshedding,
>since these warnings can already be explicitly silenced by the
>very people this is designed to protect.

My point is that 'designing to protect people' is not enough, you need
to actually protect them.  And while in general 'logically this should
protect them' is enough -- (and what intelligent people often mean by
'designing to protect people') -- when it comes to issues of cognative
psychology, the important lessons to learn are the ones that teach you
is where this one fails ---- by trying to protect X, or at least
make it easier for X, you end up making it harder.

>Having said that, if you think that deprecation warnings are
>mostly noise, why not ask the pylint and pychecker devs to
>handle that and drop the warnings altogether?

I am all for this.  And I am all for Marc André's suggestion to
raise the barrier for deprecations themselves as well.

Laura

>
>Geremy Condra
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