I have inherited the maintenance on some API code. One of the things I need to update is some environment information (think staging, production). The old names were test and production, while the new names are sandbox, simulator and production. The old name test has the same semantics as simulator today.

How this was implemented is using a class, with class instances predefined for each environment, something like:

class Environment(object):
    def __init__(self, name, params):
        self.name = name
        self.params = params

Environment.Test = Environment('test', ... params ...)
Environment.Production = Environment('production', ... params ...)

I can easily define the new names, and do something like

Environment.Test = Environment.Simulator

so existing code doesn’t break. But I’d like to have code which uses this raise a Python deprecation warning.

How can I do it? I can hack it by inserting an if inside the class code and raise a deprecation warning there, but is there a cleaner way?