QST: Global future flag

[eicchen]

Research

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N/A

Question about pandas

I remember talking about it during the last contributor meeting, but have unfortunately forgotten the specifics.

I know there is currently a 'future_stack' flag for future features to be activated in the future for the stack function. During the discussion, there was a consensus to use a global flag instead of function-specific variables to implement new functionalities to existing functions that would warrant a deprecation warning first.

Is that implemented yet? I can't seem to find anything currently in the code but could've sworn we talked about one existing.

[rhshadrach]

The decision was to implement a global flag on a per-change basis, not a single global flag. Here are some examples:

pandas/pandas/core/config_init.py

Lines 880 to 899 in bd9f060

	with cf.config_prefix("future"):
	cf.register_option(
	"infer_string",
	False if os.environ.get("PANDAS_FUTURE_INFER_STRING", "1") == "0" else True,
	"Whether to infer sequence of str objects as pyarrow string "
	"dtype, which will be the default in pandas 3.0 "
	"(at which point this option will be deprecated).",
	validator=is_one_of_factory([True, False]),
	)
	cf.register_option(
	"no_silent_downcasting",
	False,
	"Whether to opt-in to the future behavior which will *not* silently "
	"downcast results from Series and DataFrame `where`, `mask`, and `clip` "
	"methods. "
	"Silent downcasting will be removed in pandas 3.0 "
	"(at which point this option will be deprecated).",
	validator=is_one_of_factory([True, False]),
	)

Closing for now. Just comment here if you have any follow up questions.