Support deprecation of (module level) variables

[radeklat]

Hi. I just hit and interesting use case that I was not able to solve with this library. There is a module level variable and it's name has changed. Since is is not a function, I cannot decorate it with @deprecated(...).

I searched for possible solutions and found a couple of them in here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/922550/how-to-mark-a-global-as-deprecated-in-python I liked the second solution with the Deprecated class, becasue it is similar to @deprecated(...) and would allow to have the same interface.

I'm considering making a pull request but would like to check first if there would be an appetite for that.

[briancurtin]

I've been thinking about something like this as well as for actual modules themselves, so yeah, I'd like to see what's possible here—go ahead with a PR and I'll do whatever I can to help out. I wonder if it's possible to have one piece of code do what is currently being done as a decorator while also supporting your use-case, though? As in, perhaps the existing deprecated function switches to being implemented as a class to cover both, rather than possibly having two ways to do it (though I'm not sure if that's what you were suggesting).

That answer by Unknown looks like a pretty good starting point for something like this.

[radeklat]

That would be ideal if there would be one thing that could do both. But the use cases are incompatible:

• Decorator has to return a function that accepts the decorated function.
• Variable deprecation has to return something compatible with the original type (for example if the deprecated thing is a variable with string, the return value has to look like string).
  Anyway, I opened a PR: Implement DeprecatedVariable for deprecating module level variables #35

[radeklat]

It is currently failing on Python2. I'll check why and if it can be fixed.

[radeklat]

It is fixed now :)