This avoids a privacy leak when the web.static= directory is configured
but doesn't exist (which is almost always, since we set `web.static =
public_html` in the default config file, but nothing automatically
creates it). The nevow.static.File class tries to os.stat() the
directory before doing anything else, which causes an exception, which
renders the traceback to the HTTP client as a 500 Internal Server Error,
and the traceback includes the full path of the missing public_html
directory, which reveals the node's basedir.
Plain twisted.web.static.File doesn't do this check, and a missing
web.static directory just results in a plain old 404.
Closes ticket:1720.
This is the first step towards making node startup be synchronous: the
tub.port is entirely determined (including any TCP port allocation that
might be necessary) before creating the Tub, so the portnumber part of
FURLs can be determined earlier.
This little-used debugging feature allowed you to SSH or Telnet "into" a
Tahoe node, and get an interactive Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) that
executed inside the context of the running process. The SSH
authentication code used a deprecated feature of Twisted, this code had
no unit-test coverage, and I haven't personally used it in at least 6
years (despite writing it in the first place). Time to go.
Also experiment with a Twisted-style "topfiles/" directory of NEWS
fragments. The idea is that we require all user-visible changes to
include a file or two (named as $TICKETNUM.$TYPE), and then run a script
to generate NEWS during the release process, instead of having a human
scan the commit logs and summarize the changes long after they landed.
Closes ticket:2367
