Remove `request.REQUEST`

[Aymeric Augustin]

request.REQUEST provides indifferent access to request.GET or request.POST (PHP style).

This attribute is a legacy from the pre-1.0 days, when you could access the GET or POST data using dict syntax on the request object. request.REQUEST was introduced in 1.0 to make this operation more explicit, with an easy upgrade path.

It's hardly ever a good design pattern to handle GET and POST identically, and it's our responsibility not to provide tools who are more likely to result in bad code than anything else. So I think it's time to deprecate this attribute.

We could deprecate django.utils.datastructures.MergeDict at the same time — it's a 100-lines long class whose sole purpose is to support request.REQUEST.

[Aymeric Augustin]

This may break a lot of code, so this isn't a decision to make lightly.

Django itself uses request.REQUEST in i18n views, auth, and admin.

[Bouke Haarsma]

I've proposed a deprecation in-between PR: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/1756

[Tim Graham]

Mailing list thread to make sure there is consensus to move forward with this:
​https://groups.google.com/d/topic/django-developers/yw7OPb_O0QA/discussion

The patch would also need to be updated to reflect the fact that the deprecation would start in 1.7 (1.6 is feature frozen at this time).

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In 2fb5a51fa3ac276efc7121ec9de91f092a986104:

Fixed #18659 -- Deprecated request.REQUEST and MergeDict

Thanks Aymeric Augustin for the suggestion.

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In 75f107b8842dfc890ddd65262bd09ca87c3a15be:

Removed request.REQUEST per deprecation timeline; refs #18659.

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In 37b7776a015102e97b9bdd64d88c732883ff9989:

Removed django.utils.datastructures.MergeDict per deprecation timeline; refs #18659.