Brett Cannon: "If it was documented as deprecated and raising a deprecation warning then 3.2 is definitely far enough back to warrant removing it."

I understood that Brett is in favor of removing it.

Raymond Hettinger: "The tostring() method should be handled in the same way."

Done.

Raymond Hettinger: "Remediation is easy because from_bytes() is a alias"

For code supporting Python 2 and Python 3, it may be annoying, but Python 3.9 will only be released after Python 2 support will end. So I consider that it's an acceptable annoyance. Users can put "if six.PY3" in their code or don't support Python 3.9.


Raymond Hettinger: "Still, all removals cause disruption from at least some users"

I'm perfectly aware of that. But I consider that it's worth it. I chose to push my change early in the 3.9 development cycle, to get users feedback earlier. So we can still revert the change if they are too many complains.


Raymond Hettinger: "The other deprecation in the array module says, "Deprecated since version 3.3, will be removed in version 4.0".  Perhaps this one should have had the same qualifier."

I proposed PR 17523 to document that tostring() and fromstring() deprecated aliases will be removed in Python 3.9.