Apparently this was removed as part of deprecating the old strports syntax, but:

1) "twistd web --port=9000" never gave a deprecation warnings.

itamar@blake:~$ twistd --version
twistd (the Twisted daemon) 11.0.0
Copyright (c) 2001-2011 Twisted Matrix Laboratories.
See LICENSE for details.

itamar@blake:~$ twistd -n web --port=9000 --path=/
2012-03-17 20:50:21-0400 [-] Log opened.
2012-03-17 20:50:21-0400 [-] twistd 11.0.0 (/usr/bin/python 2.7.2) starting up.
2012-03-17 20:50:21-0400 [-] reactor class: twisted.internet.selectreactor.SelectReactor.
2012-03-17 20:50:21-0400 [-] twisted.web.server.Site starting on 9000
2012-03-17 20:50:21-0400 [-] Starting factory <twisted.web.server.Site instance at 0x180bd40>

2) The current --help just says " -p, --port= strports description of the port to start the server on." It'll be completely unclear to users what that means.

I am tempted to revert the ticket that removed this functionality - can anyone tell me why we shouldn't?

In particular, before the removal should be re-merged again, the original syntax should be restored, along with decent --help. We should always support just giving the port number and defaulting to TCP. As it is, we've gone from a straightforward command line option that also had some sophisticated features to something that will break in a mysterious, hard to debug manner.