[Zope-dev] Deprecate ITerms in zope.app.form? [Re: zope.browser?]

[Martijn Faassen]

Fred Drake wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 6:36 PM, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:
>> If we just leave the name importable from the old location, what is
>> hurt?  The major downside is that people won't learn about the new
>> location.  I consider this to be less an issue than the two problems I
>> outline above.
> 
> Agreed.  Moving things around in public packages without preserving
> backward compatibility creates real nuisances, and just not generating
> warnings avoids lots of pain.

Nobody was talking about breaking backwards compatibility. The whole 
idea is that the moving around doesn't break compatibility. Or do you 
consider it that the act of sending warnings itself breaks compatibility?

> This doesn't mean that you can't teach people about new locations; you
> just don't need to do it every time they run your code.

That's a nice handwave, but what infrastructure do you propose to teach 
users about new locations? The current infrastructure is automatic, and 
I hope you're not proposing something in a text file somewhere as a 
replacement.

The problem, I take it, is that the mere act of importing causes a 
warning to be sent. A tool that could scan code for import deprecations 
and give warnings would perhaps be preferrable. The deprecations would 
still need to be marked somewhere so that the tool can pick up on them, 
but they simply won't emit any warnings anymore.

Who is going to build this infrastructure?

Regards,

Martijn