On 3/22/2022 11:28 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:
On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 7:33 PM Steve Dower <steve.do...@python.org> wrote:
After a normal deprecation period, yes?
There is no backward compatibility warranty and no deprecation process
for private APIs.
And yet you're asking the question, which means you know these are
special ;)
The PEP says: "The API is purposefully listed as private to communicate
the fact that there are no semantic guarantees of the API between Python
releases."
Absence/presence isn't a semantic guarantee, it's an availability
guarantee. Code using them should be able to rely on their presence, and
ideally their prototype (though it seems we've messed that up in the
past), but shouldn't expect code that worked against 3.8 to also work
against 3.9 or 3.10.
Perhaps in hindsight, we could have not used the underscore and just
explicitly described them as being behaviorally unstable between major
versions. I guess that would have raised exactly the same question though.
The point is, it's a documented API that we've told people they can use.
We can't simply revoke that without telling people that it's going to
happen, even if we covered ourselves for there being version changes
that affect how they need to be used.
Cheers,
Steve
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