[Laura] >> Experience has shown that when people get used to seeing 'a bunch of >> warnings that don't really matter' they either a) turn them off or >> b) ignore them, even when they are telling them valuable things that >> they should be paying attention to. So constantly spitting out >> DeprecationWarnings as soon as something becomes deprecated is a >> most excellent way to train people to ignore DeprecationWarnings.
On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 10:39 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > Well at least people get a chance to see them. If some people think the > warnings are useless (even though the messages warn about removal of a > construct), they won't run a code checker either. You're misreading Laura. She's not saying that some people choose to ignore the warnings. She's pointing out that it is a scientifically known fact that people will *learn to ignore warnings* if they occur frequently enough, and that once this is learned the warnings have no effect. Look up Jef Raskin's diatribes against modal dialogs. (Or read the "cry wolf" fairy tale. :-) > If Mercurial users and developers hadn't seen those warnings at all, > perhaps Mercurial would have continued using deprecated constructs, and > ended up broken when the N+1 Python version had been released. If even > an established FLOSS project such as Mercurial is vulnerable to this > kind of risk, then any in-house or one-man project will be even more > vulnerable. If the Mercurial developers claimed that Mercurial supported Python 2.6 without extensive testing they would be rank amateurs. I don't believe they are. > Besides, do we have such a code checker that is able to find out > deprecated constructs (not talking about 2to3 here) ? At Google we use a hacked-up version of pylint which seems infinitely flexible in the checks you can specify. I assume that the public version of pylint is just as capable -- someone just needs to write a rule for it. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ stdlib-sig mailing list stdlib-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/stdlib-sig
