DEPR: pandas.io

[rhshadrach]

Similar to #27522.

Currently we document pandas.io as:

In addition, public functions in pandas.io and pandas.tseries submodules are mentioned in the documentation.

Some submodules of pandas.io have a clear delineation of whats public vs private, e.g. pandas.io.excel where all submodules are prefixed with an underscore. Others, such as pandas.io.formats, are not.

One possible way to clean this up is to do add pandas.api.io and make various objects public by exposing them there.

Pinging people who helped introduce pandas.api.typing: cc @simonjayhawkins @Dr-Irv @mroeschke @jorisvandenbossche @topper-123 @bashtage

[Dr-Irv]

I think we are inconsistent on what we document from pandas.io between the user guide and reference guide. I support the idea of moving them all to a pandas.api.io package. But this should also be done by looking at the doc references and making sure that whatever is mentioned in the user guide has a corresponding reference manual page.

[rhshadrach]

I think we are inconsistent on what we document from pandas.io between the user guide and reference guide.

Can you provide details here? The way I read the reference guide is "anything that appears in our documentation is public, otherwise it's private".

[Dr-Irv]

Can you provide details here? The way I read the reference guide is "anything that appears in our documentation is public, otherwise it's private".

Here is one example. There may be more. In https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/user_guide/io.html#sql-queries, we say "The pandas.io.sql module provides a collection of query wrappers ...", but pandas.io.sql is not in the reference manual.