[Python-Dev] When to remove deprecated stuff (original) (raw)

Petri Lehtinen petri at digip.org
Fri Aug 23 07:38:55 CEST 2013

R. David Murray wrote:

> So you're still using features deprecated three releases ago, you haven't checked for DeprecationWarnings and it's Django making your life difficult? > > Why not check for the deprecation warnings?

Doing so makes very little difference. This is my opinion (others obviously differ): Putting in one big chunk of effort at a major release boundary is easier to schedule than putting in a chunk of effort on every feature release. More importantly, having it happen only at the major release boundary means there's only one hard deadline every ten-ish years, rather than a hard deadline every 1.5 years. Expecting things to break when you switch to the new feature release makes one view feature releases with dread rather than excitement. This applies whether or not one is testing with deprecation warnings on. Yes, there's a little less pressure if you are making the fixes on the deprecation release boundary, because you can always ship the code anyway if it is winds up being too big of a bear, so you have more scheduling flexibility. But you still face the psychological hurdle of "feature release upgrade...will need to fix the all the things they've deprecated...let's put that off". Especially since what we are talking about here is the big cruft, and thus more likely to be a pain to fix.

These are my thoughts exactly. Maybe I exaggerated a bit about Django. I was slightly unaware of the deprecation policy when Django 1.3 came out (IIRC it was the first release that actually removed deprecated stuff after 1.0). Nowadays I read release notes carefully and do what's needed, and nothing has broken badly ever since.

What's really bothering me is that I have to change something in my code every time I upgrade Django. So as David said, it's more like "sigh, a new feature release again" than "yay, new cool features!". Or actually, it's a combination of both because I really want the new features.

Petri

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