[Twisted-Python] The Future of Twisted.News

[Amber Brown]

Hi all,

I thought it would be a good time to raise the topic of twisted.news and 
its future in Twisted.

Currently, t.news has below-Twisted standards of code coverage, 
implementation (with one huuuuge ad-hoc state machine), comments, tests, 
etc. It's also not had any changes to the bulk of its code for 14 years, 
apart from what appears to be code removal 6 years ago and a handful of 
"twisted-wide" mechanical syntax changes. It's also unlikely to ever be 
ported to Python 3 unless someone were to improve the former issues 
(since the port would require 100%-as-possible code coverage).

I propose deprecating twisted.news on the condition that it doesn't have 
a maintainer, and un-deprecating it if a user of the code steps up to 
maintain it and brings it into line (vs one of the current development 
team taking on work keeping an ancient protocol on life support). If 
nobody steps up, then we remove it at the end of the deprecation period 
and encourage any remaining users to either pin to old Twisteds or 
simply vendor the code in their own codebase.

The ticket I have created for this is at 
https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/9405 .

- Amber