Python's many ways of string formatting — are the older ones (going to be) deprecated?

Question

Python has at least six ways of formatting a string:

In [1]: world = \"Earth\"

# method 1a
In [2]: \"Hello, %s\" % world
Out[2]: \'Hello, Earth\'

# method          


        

Answer 1

Guido's latest position on this seems to be indicated here:

What’s New In Python 3.0

PEP 3101: A New Approach To String Formatting

A new system for built-in string formatting operations replaces the % string formatting operator. (However, the % operator is still supported; it will be deprecated in Python 3.1 and removed from the language at some later time.) Read PEP 3101 for the full scoop.

And the PEP3101 itself, which has the last modified dating back to (Fri, 30 Sep 2011), so no progress as of late on that one, I suppose.