Not Even My Wife Reads This

I've been running Python 2.6 (released October 1) as the only Python on my Gentoo desktop for a few weeks. In most ways, it's the Best Python Ever. It's got per-user site-packages. It's got the multiprocessing module so you can use lots of CPU cores without thinking too hard. It's got abstract base classes. It's got binary literals. It's got ast.literal_eval, so you can safely evaluate static dicts without worrying about security. It's got other cool stuff that you can read about here.

But it constantly spews annoying deprecation warnings like this:

dripton@al ~/src/Slugathon/slugathon $ ./Connect.py
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/twisted/internet/_sslverify.py:4: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead
import itertools, md5


Or this:
dripton@al ~/src/projecteuler $ py.test test_euler86.py
===================================== test process starts =====================================
executable: /usr/bin/python (2.6.0-final-0)
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/py/process/cmdexec.py:27: DeprecationWarning: The popen2 module is deprecated. Use the subprocess module.
import popen2
using py lib: /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/py


or even this:
dripton@al ~/src/Colossus-git/Colossus $ ant
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/java_config_2/EnvironmentManager.py:15: DeprecationWarning: the sets module is deprecated
from sets import Set
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/java_config_2/EnvironmentManager.py:15: DeprecationWarning: the sets module is deprecated
from sets import Set
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/java_config_2/EnvironmentManager.py:15: DeprecationWarning: the sets module is deprecated
from sets import Set
/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/java_config_2/EnvironmentManager.py:15: DeprecationWarning: the sets module is deprecated
from sets import Set
Buildfile: build.xml
...
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 5 seconds


If you're reading carefully, you'll notice one important fact: none of those warnings were in my code. I imported twisted, and got warnings because twisted used md5. I ran py.test, and got warnings because py.test used popen2. I ran ant, which last time I checked was a Java program, and got warnings because some Python script wrapped around the Java used sets.Set.

Of course, there's a good reason for these warnings. Python 3.0 is coming, and many of the features that trigger deprecation warnings in 2.6 will be gone in 3.0. (Well, no important functionality will truly go away, but where there are two ways to do something, sometimes they'll pick one and axe the other.) This is useful and important, but will cause pain. And the pain has already started.

Of course, I know how to silence the warnings. Temporarily:
dripton@al ~/src/Slugathon/slugathon $ python -Wignore Connect.py

Or permanently:
$ sudo vim /usr/lib/python2.6/sets.py
#import warnings
#warnings.warn("the sets module is deprecated", DeprecationWarning,
# stacklevel=2)


But it's annoying to have to do that. Especially when you didn't even realize you were running a Python program, as in the ant example above.

I predict lots of whining about this when 2.6 goes more mainstream (say, when it becomes default in Ubuntu).