[pytest-dev] Requesting a change of our deprecation policy and the potentially removal of the features branch

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

Hi everyone,

in the last few months i have tried to find a way to work with/around 
our deprecation policy while detangleing Nodes (and something similar 
will be required for fixtures as well).

This process has been rather frustrating and time-eating so far,
additionally the changes (like for example node-from-parent) do not 
nearly deliver as much value as i hoped it would.

For me personally i arrived at the conclusion, that if the current 
deprecation policy stays,
its no longer reasonable for me to spend time on trying to restructure 
the entangled  internals of pytest.

In addition, even when attempting to iterate this in small breaking 
increments,
its abysmally ineffective from a feedback loop standpoint to have the 
feature branch gate such changes for longer time-frames.

As such i want to request that we enable pushing for "reasonably sized" 
breaking changes way more often.

(where reasonably sized means touches exposed internals/structure in 
such a way that it wont affect normal  users, but might affect plugins 
that are deeply involved)

(examples of this are dropping support for the config/session parameters 
for node constructors, changing the behavior of the node-id creation, 
changing the config object initialization lifecycle/state  management).


And additionally i want to request dropping the feature branch mechanism 
in order to get a much tighter feedback loop on the changes going in.


-- Ronny