I have seen multiple discussions where somebody wants to deprecate a
useless function but somebody else complains that we cannot do that
because the function in question cannot be removed (because of backwards
compatibility). See https://bugs.python.org/issue29548 for an example.
We currently have a deprecation policy saying that functions deprecated
in version N cannot be removed before version N+2. That's a reasonable
policy but some deprecation purists insist that it MUST (instead of MAY)
be removed in version N+2. Following this reasoning, we cannot deprecate
something that we cannot remove.
Personally, I think that this reasoning is flawed: even if we cannot
*remove* a function, we can still *deprecate* it. That way, we send a
message that the function shouldn't be used anymore. And it makes it
easier to remove it in the (far) future: if the function was deprecated
for a while, we have a valid reason to remove it. The longer it was
deprecated, the less likely it is to be still used, which makes it
easier to remove eventually.
So I suggest to embrace such long-term deprecations, where we deprecate
something without planning in advance when it will be removed. This is
actually how most other open source projects that I know handle
deprecations.
I'd like to know the opinion of the Python core devs here.
Cheers,
Jeroen.
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