What to use instead of nntplib?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2023-05-16, Alan Gauld <learn2program at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16/05/2023 10:06, Cameron Simpson wrote:
>
>>> I'm curious as to why nntplib is deprecated? Surely there are still a
>>> lot of nntp servers around, both inside and outside corporate firewalls?

Anything not used to develop AI is going to be depricated. An AI told
me, so it must be true.

>>> Is there a problem with the module or is it just perceived as no longer
>>> required?

Two issues were cited:

 1. It's too stable, bug-free, and feature-complete. IOW "no
    activity". Apparently, people equate "activity" with "usage".

 2. A problem with automated testing, since there's no server side
    support. Though testing a module's client implementation by having
    it talk to a module's server implementation seems like a
    singularly bad idea.


>> See PEP 594: https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/
>
> Thanks Cameron.
> A scary list; I must have a dozen projects from the late 90s still
> live that are using many of these! I'm glad I'm retired and won't
> be the one who has to fix 'em :-)

It has been pointed out to me that Perl still has a supported NNTP
library. That stung. However, it's a CPAN module, which is more
equivalent to PyPI than to the standard library, so I guess that it
isn't as bad a loss of face as I feared.

--
Grant