Deprecation needed for frange and others?

[efiring]

mlab.frange is not used anywhere in mpl and is not needed for matlab compatibility, so probably it should be deprecated and eventually removed. There might be other mlab functions in the same category.

[anntzer]

fwiw see discussion at #6577 (comment) (I'm all for it).

[anntzer]

@efiring Would you support a complete deprecation of mlab in 2.1?

[tacaswell]

For these very old tools that we would like to get rid of I suggest deprecating for removal in 3.0.

When we drop py2 support, that is going to be coupled with a major version bump so this will happen in 2018(ish).

[efiring]

We are using a few of them in our examples (e.g. the bivariate normal), and even some in our modules (especially contour--to my surprise). We could move what we need to cbook; some of the things I see in our modules are well within the scope of cbook.

[QuLogic]

Is enough of this done in #9151 to close this?

[anntzer]

I'm going to assume #9151 was indeed enough, feel free to reopen if there's more to deprecate (or directly open a PR).