DEPR: Categorical.to_list

[jbrockmendel]

We have this as an alias for tolist for Categorical but not other EAs. We should either deprecate it or add the alias on the base class. I prefer deprecation.

[phershbe]

@jbrockmendel @lithomas1 I'm interested in working on this. I've done two pull requests on fixing tests here and am interested in learning and contributing more.

Is this as simple as deleting the to_list on Line 555 of https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/blob/main/pandas/core/arrays/categorical.py and documenting the change? There are several other instances of to_list when searching the code base, but the others seem to be the aliases for Series and Index.

[jbrockmendel]

I'd suggest waiting to make sure there is consensus that this is worthwhile.

[topper-123]

I agree deprecation is the sensible thing to do here.

[SirFudgekins]

take