[Twisted-Python] [INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE] Removal of twisted.manhole and twisted.spread.ui

Glyph

2016-05-14 20:56:23 UTC

Post by Amber "Hawkie" Brown
As part of some spring cleaning, I'm removing two of the largest sections of unmaintained, undocumented, and mostly untested code in Twisted. These are twisted.manhole (not twisted.conch.manhole, which is over SSH/telnet; twisted.manhole is over PB) and twisted.spread.ui (a GTK interface + some other things that are similar in purpose, which also depends on twisted.manhole). They are both broken and not very useful in their current form; and any improvements would require an almost complete rewrite, meaning that there's little to no chance that they are worth keeping.
- https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/8329 -- removing twisted.spread.ui
- https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/8330 -- removing twisted.manhole
The git branches are available on the Trac links. They will be available for a week from now before the minimum merge time, as per the policy, for you to test your applications.
- Amber

Thanks for doing the compatability notification, Amber.

While I'm always happy to see the process followed to ensure that we don't leave our users in the lurch, I suspect that it would have been very hard for anyone to actually make use of these with a modern Twisted.

For what it's worth, I'm quite sad to see them go; features like this made early versions of Twisted kind of special, in my opinion. But they never really survived the transition to our "new" (i.e. "within the last decade") standards for quality and maintainability, so they've been slowly rotting.

I say this because I hope the acknowledgement that they're just broken and their removal will inspire folks to consider re-engineering some features like this, that provide enhanced visibility into the activity of the event loop and that provide native GUI tools for people to understand Twisted. It would inspire me if I didn't have so much else already to do before PyCon ;-).

-glyph