[DISCUSS] Should we start marking "feather" as deprecated?

[Weston Pace <we...@gmail.com>]

Feather V2 is currently synonymous with the IPC format.  My impression
is that the feather terminology is now being deprecated in favor of
IPC.  Do we want to start marking feather modules as deprecated (both
in code and the documentation) and more explicitly point users to the
newer RecordBatchFileReader / RecordBatchStreamReader alternatives?

Re: [DISCUSS] Should we start marking "feather" as deprecated?

[Alessandro Molina <al...@ursacomputing.com>]

I think from users point of view it would be helpful to have only one
clearly documented glossary and way to do things.
At the moment, at least for the Python documentation, is not very clear
what's the difference between feather and ipc.new_file
Deprecating the Feather terminology would surely solve this problem, but
even if we don't end up deprecating it I think we should make more clear
what users are expected to rely on as otherwise there is the risk is of
building a product that competes with itself and ends up creating confusion
in users.

Re: [DISCUSS] Should we start marking "feather" as deprecated?

[Wes McKinney <we...@gmail.com>]

I don't have a strong view on this. As is, Feather serves as a
convenient / simple encapsulation of an IPC file. Plenty of people use
pandas.read_feather, so if we mark the name as deprecated in Arrow,
then we would be asking pandas and other downstream consumers to
deprecate it also in favor of read_arrow_file or something similar. In
either case, it would be good to collect some feedback from various
stakeholders.

On Mon, Jul 12, 2021 at 3:51 PM Weston Pace <we...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Feather V2 is currently synonymous with the IPC format.  My impression
> is that the feather terminology is now being deprecated in favor of
> IPC.  Do we want to start marking feather modules as deprecated (both
> in code and the documentation) and more explicitly point users to the
> newer RecordBatchFileReader / RecordBatchStreamReader alternatives?