[Twisted-Python] relative priority of deprecation tickets

Glyph Lefkowitz glyph at twistedmatrix.com
Mon Jul 5 20:30:15 MDT 2010


Hello there everybody - and by "everybody" I mostly mean "thijs" :-).

I've noticed that there is an increasing proliferation of small, "remove some deprecated stuff" tickets in the Twisted tracker.  While, nominally, according to our own process, everything that is deprecated should eventually be removed, some removals should be more eventual than others.

For example, Jean-Paul Calderone had this to say (on IRC) about <http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/4548>:

<exarkun> The thing that's deprecated in twisted.news.nntp is supporting applications that return a string from a particular api instead of an Article instance
<exarkun> The support code for that case is one line
<exarkun> In the 6 years it has existed, it has cost zero maintenance time

The real purpose of these 'removal' tickets is to reduce maintenance overhead by eliminating redundant code that doesn't need to be maintained, and shouldn't be presented to new users (in API docs, in examples, etc).  Some code really does produce a maintenance burden and needs to be thought about a lot.  But we can really afford to let innocuous one-liners slide for quite a long time; in the meanwhile, all they're doing is providing a more useful error message for developers using the older API.

Of course, small maintenance tickets like this do serve as a way to provide 'easy' work to newcomers, and that's great.  But if newcomers are going to do easy things, a much more worthwhile type of grunt-work would be for them to remove warnings that Twisted itself, especially 'trial twisted' is _emitting_.  Similarly, if anyone would like to spend time filing individual tickets to provide more fine-grained warning-removal tickets ("twisted emits warnings" is obviously way too big for one patch) that would be more helpful.

If you are going to file tickets for removing code that nobody is really having to maintain at the moment, please set their priority to 'lowest', since leaving them at 'normal' creates the misleading impression that they are just as important as fixing bugs, adding documentation or implementing features.

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