As explained in my comment, this change is going to be an API breakage if we backport this commit to 3.0.x branch as it is (I believe it's ok to remove it from 4.0.0 right away). As I suggested in my comment, only for the backport, I could turn this into a ``def``, mark it ``deprecated``, so we avoid breaking compatibility. I believe this is the right thing to do, let me know if you disagree.