Hi, I'm going to try explaining in short why I think each of these
functions in _tkinter could be marked as deprecated and then removed on
2.8 (if it is decided to do it) and 3.1.

globalcall: It is not used anywhere in tkinter. It was abandoned, and
doesn't work in the same situations where "call" would work (with
threads). It doesn't care about converting the result to a proper python
object -- it is always a string (another result of the abandonment).
"call" already works in the Tcl global space, because it needs to do so
(see issue1581476). Even tcl 8.2 says Tcl_GlobalEval (the root of
"globalcall") is old and deprecated.

merge: globalcall depends on merge, but removing globalcall makes merge
obsolete. It is not used by tkinter either. Searching for "tk.merge" on
google codesearch returns a single result dating back python 1.1!

globaleval: Uses Tcl_GlobalEval too. I haven't seen it being used,
instead I always see eval being used.

From the recent large thread on c.l.py regarding Python GUIs I understand that the author of this issue Guilherme Polo has done a massive amount of work on Tkinter.  Would it therefore be possible for him to give an update as to whether this issue can be closed as out of date, already actioned but not recorded, or whatever?  Thanks.

There are several other issues raised by Guilherme Polo regarding Tkinter, sorry I'm too lazy to repeat this comment on all of them.

Is it still possible to get this into 3.2 and have them remove in 3.3?

Guilherme, I suggest you ask about that on pydev and/or idle-dev, or just commit the addition of PendingDeprecationWarnings and wait for reactions.

Andrew, you can take over this issue if you want.  As you’ve discovered with #3035, our deprecation process is a bit unclear (this was discussed on python-dev a few months ago), so using PendingDeprecationWarning vs. DeprecationWarning is a judgment call.

Will do.

Attaching the patch to make depredations.

LGTM (looks good to me).  In your NEWS entry, you don’t have to copy the whole explanation, just say something like “deprecated old, unused functions” and interested people will be able to come here read the details.  In your commit message, be sure to say that the patch does not add deprecation notices in the doc because the functions are undocumented.

New changeset 6023d73c6f87 by Andrew Svetlov in branch 'default':
fix issue #5136: deprecate old unused functions from tkinter.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/6023d73c6f87

Pushed deprecation warnings into default branch.
#14446 updated to add those function to remove list for 3.4 release.

Thanks to Guilherme Polo for idea and to Éric Araujo for review.