I would love to use the time machine to kill the 'fail' variants as well
as 'assert_'.  However they are in use and we don't want to break
people's tests.  Breaking tests is painful.  And there are a lots of
tests.  So we'll have to support them for a long, long time.  Maybe we
can stop documenting them in 3.1 (this would also require changing
things so that the 'def' lines all use the 'assert' variants).  Then
maybe we can start deprecating them in 3.2 and 3.3, and perhaps remove
them in 3.4.  I recommend we let 2.x alone, but 2to3 should fix all these.

(And don't worry, Skip, somebody already put that message back.  You can
click on the link to deleted items in the History section at the bottom
of the issue.)