Comment 4 for bug 1445619

I'm currently seeking review for an updated version of the patch in Twisted #7717. After that I'll be able to get back to working on Twisted #7672.

In parallel, I'm trying to upgrade Launchpad to the current version of Twisted, which is 15.3.0. This is complicated for at least two reasons:

 * It needs a newer version of pyOpenSSL, but zc.buildout has trouble with the python-openssl package that's already installed on the system.
 * Newer versions of Twisted break testtools. I've submitted the necessary fix as https://github.com/testing-cabal/testtools/pull/149, but that still means we have to upgrade testtools, which involves upgrading pbr, which involves a build system that supports setup_requires, which zc.buildout really doesn't.

buildout has been a thorn in my side for a while, and I've started work on converting to a build system based on virtualenv and pip instead. The current status is that it's dealing with all the Python packages it needs to install with acceptable performance, but I still have to work out how to do the templated script generation that buildout is currently doing for us, and I expect initial deployment will be interesting. So this is still going to take a while. If that effort stalls then we do have the fallback plan of backporting patches from Twisted upstream, although I'd prefer to avoid that if we can, and it's moot until patches are actually accepted into Twisted upstream.