What about a decorator module version 3.0?

[Michele Simionato]

I am thinking about releasing a new version of the decorator module,
completely rewritten from scratch. The new implementation takes half
the lines of the original one and it is much more general, so I like
it more. However, there is an issue of compatibility with the past and
I am asking here for feedback from my users.

I have already broken backward compatibility in the past, with version
2.0 of the module, and I could break it again in version 3.0. However,
the breakage in version 2.0 was very minor and at the time the module
had very few users so that nobody ever complained.

Nowadays there are a lot of people using it and there are frameworks
relying on it (such as Pylons) so I am relectant to break
compatibility, even in minor ways.

I want to ask people how do they use the module. If you just use the
decorator function, that will continue to work as before and I do not
think I will ever break that functionality - actually I am thinking of
enhancing it.

However, over the time I have added other utilities to the module - I
am referring to getinfo and new_wrapper - and I would like to get rid
of them. Actually I would like to deprecate them in decorator 3.0 and
to remove them in decorator 3.1 or later on, after a grace period of
one year or so.

Also, I would like to remove a new feature introduced in version 2.3,
i.e. the direct support to decorator factories. I added it in haste
and now I have changed my mind. Is there anybody using that
functionality? I want to offer an alternative which does not involve
magically adding a __call__ method to a class.

In general I want to remove a few things because I feel they add to
the learning curve without offering a compelling benefit, or because I
think the new implementation offer better ways to do the same job.

If nobody uses those features I will remove them; on the other hand,
if this is too much of a breakage, I will just start a new project
with a different name. The old decorator module will continue to live
forever, but the developement on it will stop and the new things will
go in the new module.

Personally, I would like to keep the name, and to add some support for
Python 3.0: decorator 3.0 sounds good for Python 3.0, and the change I
have in mind is the same kind of change which happened for Python 3.0,
i.e. a simplification more than an addition of new features.

What do you people think?