[Python-Dev] folding cElementTree behind ElementTree in 3.3 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Feb 14 05:16:59 CET 2012

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Eli Bendersky <eliben at gmail.com> wrote:

An open question remains on whether to deprecate cElementTree, now that this change is in place.

Currently in 3.3 the whole cElementTree module is: # Deprecated alias for xml.etree.ElementTree from xml.etree.ElementTree import * Would it be alright to issue a DeprecationWarning if this module is imported? Then hopefully a couple of releases after 3.3 we can just dump it.

What do we really gain by dumping it, though? Just add a CPython specific test that ensures:

for key, value in xml.etree.ElementTree.__dict__.items():
    self.assertIs(getattr(xml.etree.cElementTree, key), value)

and then ignore it for the next decade or so.

Programmatic deprecation is a significant imposition on third party developers and should really be reserved for APIs that actively encourage writing broken code (e.g. contextlib.nested) or are seriously problematic for python-dev to maintain. For cleanup stuff, documented deprecation is sufficient.

Something that might be worth doing (although it would likely scare the peanut gallery) is to create a PEP 4000 to record the various cleanup tasks (like dropping cElementTree) that are being deliberately excluded from the 3.x series.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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