Python: How to deprecate a function alias

Question

As the title states, what I want to achieve is the following: I have a python code base for which I want to rename all the functions from camelCasing to underscore_naming. In order to maintain backwards compatibility, I have renamed all the functions, but have created function aliases for all the old names. So far, so good.

Now what I want to do is add deprecation warnings to the function aliases, preferably in a fashion like this:

def do_something():
    ...


@deprecated(deprecated_in='2.0',
            details='All functions have been adapted to fit the PEP8 standard. Please use "do_something" instead')
doSomething = do_something

So that if somebody uses the old API call, they will get a deprecation warning. I've taken a look at deprecation and Deprecated, but neither of them seem to work on aliases.

I realise that I can create a function definition for every deprecated name and decorate that, but that loses the elegance of the function alias, and makes for more mucky code. Does anybody have a good suggestion to achieve what I want?

user_449339 · Answer

I actually ended up going for a different solution, similar to what's suggested in Method and property aliases with custom docstring in Python.

I modified my code to

@alias('doSomething', deprecated=True)
def do_something():
    ...

and added a deprecation warning to the alias decorator.

Python: How to deprecate a function alias

1 Answers