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

[Antoine Pitrou]

> If the package is a stand-alone application (c.f. Barry's bzr example), 
> it's not reasonable to ask end users to modify its code; they may not 
> even be able to easily (i.e. root privileges required).  More generally, 
> it seems unfair and unwise to ask the 10 000 users of a package to take 
> action when ultimately the 1 maintainer of the package is the one who 
> needs to do so.

That's why it is advised to report the problem to the maintainer (or
perhaps the packager, in case e.g. of a linux distro), like you do for
any other bug.

It should be stressed again that it is not a very common problem (how
many Python apps do you routinely launch from the command-line, apart
from hg, bzr, buildout & friends? (*)), and it's not a critical one
either (you can perfectly live with it, like you can live with the
occasional warning about a self-signed HTTPS certificate).
On the other had, having the application break when upgrading to Python
N+1 would be critical.

(*) All these are developer tools by the way, not end-user apps.