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

James Y Knight foom at fuhm.net
Wed Nov 17 17:23:43 CET 2010

On Nov 17, 2010, at 10:30 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 7:24 AM, James Y Knight <foom at fuhm.net> wrote:

On Nov 17, 2010, at 9:19 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

(and is a little trickier in the case of module level globals, since those can't be deprecated properly)

People keep saying this, but there have already been examples shown of how to do it. I actually think that python should include a way to do so standard -- it's a reasonable enough desire, as shown by how many times in this thread the inability to do so has been mentioned. If the existing working 3rd-party mechanisms aren't good enough for python-dev standards, come up with a new way... That's quite the distraction from the current thread though. Start discussing it on python-ideas, or submit a code fix, or something in between. But the hackish way that some 3rd party frameworks use (replacing the module object with a class instance in sys.modules) is clearly not right for the standard library (I'll explain on python-ideas if you insist).

I just don't want people to use the current lack as an excuse to simply remove module attributes without prior deprecation (or make a compatibility policy which recommends doing such a thing). I'll leave it up to the experts on this list (or python-ideas...) to determine how to implement a module-level deprecation in a way that isn't considered "hackish". (Or, if there is no such way, there's also the alternative of simply never removing module-level names.)

James

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