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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Fri Feb 17 23:04:01 CET 2012

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 4:29 AM, Ezio Melotti <ezio.melotti at gmail.com> wrote:

I'm assuming that eventually the module will be removed (maybe for Python 4?), and I don't expect nor want to seen it removed in the near future. If something gets removed it should be deprecated first, and it's usually better to deprecate it sooner so that the developers have more time to update their code.

Not really - as soon as we programmatically deprecate something, it means anyone with a strict warnings policy (or with customers that have such a policy) has to update their code now. (Previously it was even worse than that, which is why deprecation warnings are no longer displayed by default).

For things that we have no intention of deprecating in 3.x, but will likely ditch in a hypothetical future Python 4000, we'll almost certainly do exactly what we did with Pyk: later in the 3.x series, add a "-4" command line switch and a sys.py4kwarning flag to trigger conditional deprecation warnings.

So, assuming things continue as they have for the first couple of decades of Python's existence, we can probably start worrying about it some time around 2020 :)

Cheers, Nick.

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

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