DEPR: .consolidate() should be non-public

[jreback]

no user reason to use this, and will eventually disappear in pandas 2.0 anyhow.

I would rename to _consolidate() and then provide a deprecation warning for .consolidate(). Would need to change some internal code to use the renamed version.

xref #15482 (comment)

[GuessWhoSamFoo]

I'd be interested in working on this. Does renaming to _consolidate() mean that calling the method on a dataframe would be df._consolidate() ,or is there a way to change the name but still access with df.consolidate()?

[jorisvandenbossche]

@GuessWhoSamFoo You can rename the existing consolidate method to _consolidate, and then create a new consolidate method that has a deprecation warning and calls the _consolidate method.

[jreback]

@GuessWhoSamFoo the point is that a user should never need to call .consolidate() at all, this is an internal implementation detail. We call this a little bit in the pandas implementation code, IOW, in things like core/groupby, core/generic and such. These should be changed to ._consolidate.