Hi,

[note: this is almost a copy of my initial message in #11293, but, as @jklymak suggested, this issue is the one open at present]

It's only pretty recently that I discovered the deprecation of xmin, xmax arguments since I'm working with stable releases of Matlplotlib and I only "conda update -all" every month or so. I was pretty surprised, because over the years, I've been consistently using these keyword args and I had literally forgotten that the left and right arguments existed anyway!

So I got rather frustrated by the deprecation, and thus I dig in the PRs. What I read didn't convinced me:

• original PR Convert **kwargs to named arguments for a clearer API #11137 *"Convert *kwargs to named arguments for a clearer API "

  • first, of course, the purpose of the PR was not to change any API.
  • xmin/max got depecrated far in the middle of the discussion, but only with a very low level of motivation: "Would it be worth deprecating ...?". The reason is purely aesthetical (once the genuine issue of the silent overwrite between the synonymous arguments is settled of course.).
  • then there is a debate whether left is clearer than xmin of vice versa: which one should get deprecated after all?
  • finally deprecation is done while said to be "tangential to the purpose".
  • → As an external reader, it seems that this deprecation was close to the outcome of a dice roll!

• in PR Lim parameter naming #11293, it is stated that the newly prefered notation left/right makes no sense in other contexts like polar plots

• now in this PR Still naming inconsistency in API on axes limits #11761, @timhoffm uncovers that the xmin terminology is in fact used elsewhere in Matplotlib API.

So my conclusion is that the "consequence analysis" (sorry, I don't have the proper word for this) for this deprecation was a bit short and I'm not sure the aesthetical reason (the duplicate keywords which I agree is odd) is worth breaking piles of existing codes (assuming I'm not the only weird addict user of xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax ;-) ). Am I indeed lonely?

Tagging as release critical. Are we really still sure that deprecating xmin, xmax etc. is a good idea (I'm not).

Discussed this on the phone call and decided that we should revert the deprecation of the xmin/xmax and ymin/ymax kwargs.

I still think un-deprecating these is the right path, but I would stress that before #11137 these kwargs were undocumented! That definitely contributed to short discussion "these are not documented, so we expect no one to be using them, but let's do a deprecation cycle just to be safe" is not an un-reasonable position to take.

@pierre-haessig Thanks for digging into this! See #13425

Fixed by #13425