[Python-Dev] PEP 565: Show DeprecationWarning in __main__

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 2:26 AM, Serhiy Storchaka <storchaka at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems to me that most of issues with FutureWarning on GitHub [1] are
> related to NumPy and pandas which use FutureWarning for its original nominal
> purpose, for warning about using programming interfaces that will change the
> behavior in future. This doesn't have any relation to end users unless the
> end user is an author of the written code.
>
> [1] https://github.com/search?q=FutureWarning&type=Issues

Eh, numpy does use FutureWarning for changes where the same code will
transition from doing one thing to doing something else without
passing through a state where it raises an error. But that decision
was based on FutureWarning being shown to users by default, not
because it matches the nominal purpose :-). IIRC I proposed this
policy for NumPy in the first place, and I still don't even know if it
matches the original intent because the docs are so vague. "Will
change behavior in the future" describes every case where you might
consider using FutureWarning *or* DeprecationWarning, right?

We have been using DeprecationWarning for changes where code will
transition from working -> raising an error, and that *is* based on
the Official Recommendation to hide those by default whenever
possible. We've been doing this for a few years now, and I'd say our
experience so far has been... poor. I'm trying to figure out how to
say this politely. Basically it doesn't work at all. What happens in
practice is that we issue a DeprecationWarning for a year, mostly
no-one notices, then we make the change in a 1.x.0 release, everyone's
code breaks, we roll it back in 1.x.1, and then possibly repeat
several times in 1.(x+1).0 and 1.(x+2).0 until enough people have
updated their code that the screams die down. I'm pretty sure we'll be
changing our policy at some point, possibly to always use
FutureWarning for everything.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org