[Python-Dev] Breaking undocumented API (original) (raw)

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com exarkun at twistedmatrix.com
Mon Nov 8 23:35:53 CET 2010

On 09:57 pm, brett at python.org wrote:

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 13:45, <exarkun at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:

On 09:25 pm, brett at python.org wrote:

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 13:03,  <exarkun at twistedmatrix.com> wrote:

On 07:58 pm, brett at python.org wrote:

I don't think a strict don't remove without deprecation policy is workable.  For example, is trace.rxblank constant part of the trace module API that needs to be preserved indefinitely?  I don't even know if it is possible to add a deprecation warning to it, but CoverageResults.blankre would certainly be a better place for it. The deprecation policy obviously cannot apply to module-level attributes. I'm not sure why this is.  Can you elaborate? There is no way to directly trigger a DeprecationWarning for an attribute. We can still document it, but there is just no way to programmatically enforce it. What about deprecatedModuleAttribute (<http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/api/twisted.python.deprecate.html>) or zope.deprecation (<http://docs.zope.org/zope3/Book/deprecation/show.html>) which inspired it? Just checked the code and it looks like it substitutes the module for some proxy object? To begin that break subclass checks. After that I don't know the ramifications without really digging into the ModuleType code.

That could be fixed if ModuleType allowed subclassing. :)

For what it's worth, no one has complained about problems caused by deprecatedModuleAttribute, but we've only been using it for about two and a half years.

Jean-Paul

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