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Merriam Webster lists the following relevant meanings for "deprecated":

> to express disapproval of

> to withdraw official support for or discourage the use of (something, such as a software product) in favor of a newer or better alternative

In other words, deprecated is a strong signal that one should strive to migrate from items marked as such.




So what? As long as it works, don't change it. This parts are deprecated since up to nearly a decade (Python 3.2 was released February 20th, 2011). And they will work for some more years. Some have not even a working replacement yet. Investing now in changing old code just to be compatible to a not even released version, is a bit pointless if you have more important work on the list.


Python 2 was supported for way longer than initially announced. Distutils as well. Maybe deprecated is not a strong enough signal because many projects hesitate to cut stuff loose that they deprecated because of the community backslash. Sometimes things have to be deprecated, but the community will never get around to adapt to that if they stick around forever.

Compared to that, Java still carries some deprecated items around. But with Java 9, deprecation for removal was introduced, which is a strong signal that stuff will be gone in two releases. Kubernetes has a strict deprecation policy as well, such that skipping more than two releases is asking for trouble.




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