From the issue:

The goal of this issue is only to remove the first part (encode_int use on the hub).

Issue #750 is about changing the hub behavior, not actually dropping this function. Of course, if we stop using it, there is little reason to keep it, but we shouldn't actually drop it entirely without deprecating it first.

Other xmlrpc clients may have trouble. For that reason, I'm targeting this at least one release out in the hopes that we can have some conversation and data-gathering first.

I'm not sure we've really done any data gathering here. We should probably have a broader discussion first. I don't know for sure which xmlrpc clients support i8. We do have non-python clients interacting with Koji. Can kojiji handle this?

I've posted a thread on koji-devel about this

Commit 088d500e fixes this pull-request