Feedback from users suggests that the deprecation notices are too noisy/scary. This might be resolved by switching to using the Python native warnings system.

I think it is highly desirable that we change to JSON i18n before the next release, so people who download the RC dont need to switch i18n formats.

The JSON i18n work has highlighted a major packaging issue that we've yet to resolve. How are the scripts going to be released?
Releasing a 'pywikibot' package on pypi is going to be of limited value if users do not have a simple way to use the scripts with the pypi-released package.
Perhaps not so important for RC1, but we should also package the family files separately from the library, as the family files need to be updated as site configuration changes, and hopefully this does not require a new release of pywikibot every time a new language is added, etc. (We have feature requests to make family features dynamic, but we are not tracking very well on those enhancements)

Also, consistent naming of bots would be nice (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/147541/) and a roughly related changeset to fix script import syntax (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/174594/), the latter of which is a dependency for the readthedocs sphinx documentation system.

RFC created for packaging issues. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/pywikibot_2.0_packaging