[Python-Dev] Deprecating the formatter module (original) (raw)

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Mon Aug 12 23:22:01 CEST 2013

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 12:22 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

At the PyCon CA sprint someone discovered the formatter module had somewhat low code coverage. We discovered this is because it's tested by testsundry, i.e. it's tested by importing it and that's it.

We then realized that it isn't really used by anyone (pydoc uses it but it should have been using textwrap). Looking at the history of the module it has just been a magnet for cleanup revisions and not actual usage or development since Guido added it back in 1995. I have created http://bugs.python.org/issue18716 to deprecate the formatter module for removal in Python 3.6 unless someone convinces me otherwise that deprecation and removal is the wrong move.

I wish we had a way to collect real-world usage on such things. I tried a couple of code search engines, but this one is difficult to unravel because many Python packages have their own formatter module (for example Django, pygments) that probably does something different.

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