←back to thread

Deprecations via warnings don't work for Python libraries

(sethmlarson.dev)
45 points scolby33 | 7 comments | 08 Dec 25 18:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.822s | source | bottom
Show context
theamk ◴[08 Dec 25 18:24 UTC] No.46195792[source]▶
Deprecations via warnings don't reliably work anywhere, in general.

If you are a good developer, you'll have extensive unit test coverage and CI. You never see the unit test output (unless they fail) - so warnings go unnoticed.

If you are a bad developer, you have no idea what you are doing and you ignore all warnings unless program crashes.

replies(8): >>46196064 #>>46197215 #>>46203939 #>>46220846 #>>46221176 #>>46221435 #>>46221650 #>>46221723 #
1. eternityforest ◴[08 Dec 25 20:29 UTC] No.46197215[source]▶
Why is it that CI tools don't make warnings visible? Why are they ignored by default in the first place? Seems like that should be a rather high priority.
replies(3): >>46220771 #>>46220984 #>>46224332 #
2. metadat ◴[10 Dec 25 17:40 UTC] No.46220771[source]▶
Most of the time they don't matter and aren't an immediate problem.

The Business doesn't care about warnings, they want working software NOW.

3. bluGill ◴[10 Dec 25 17:55 UTC] No.46220984[source]▶
It isn't that easy. If you have a new warning on upgrade you probably want to work on it "next week", but that means you need to ignore it for a bit. Or you might still want to support a really old version without the new API and so you can't fix it now.
replies(1): >>46221546 #
4. Hizonner ◴[10 Dec 25 18:33 UTC] No.46221546[source]▶
> If you have a new warning on upgrade you probably want to work on it "next week", but that means you need to ignore it for a bit.

So you create a bug report or an issue or a story or whatever you happen to call it, and you make sure it gets tracked, and you schedule it with the rest of your work. That's not the same thing as "ignoring" it.

replies(1): >>46221674 #
5. bluGill ◴[10 Dec 25 18:42 UTC] No.46221674{3}[source]▶
And you always have something more important/interesting to do and so never get around to it.
replies(1): >>46221705 #
6. Hizonner ◴[10 Dec 25 18:44 UTC] No.46221705{4}[source]▶
... which means that when the axe falls, the results are 100 percent your fault.
7. michaelt ◴[10 Dec 25 21:47 UTC] No.46224332[source]▶
> Why is it that CI tools don't make warnings visible?

A developer setting up CI decides to start an ubuntu 24.04 container and run 'apt-get install npm'

This produces 3,600 lines of logging (5.4 log lines per package, 668 packages) and 22 warnings (all warnings about man page creation being skipped)

Then they decide "Nobody's going to read all that, and the large volume might bury important information. I think I'll hide console output for processes that don't fail."

Now your CI doesn't show warnings.