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Deprecations via warnings don't work for Python libraries

(sethmlarson.dev)
45 points scolby33 | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 18:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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.

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1. mrweasel ◴[10 Dec 25 18:41 UTC] No.46221650[source]▶
There was this one library we depended on, it was sort of in limbo during the Python 2 -> 3 migration. During that period is was maintained by this one person who'd just delete older versions when never ones became available. In one year I think we had three or four instances where our CI and unit tests just broke randomly one day, because the APIs had changed and the old version of the library had been yanked.

In hindsight it actually helped us, because in frustrations we ended up setting up our own Python package repo and started to pay more attention to our dependencies.