See #5936 and #5938 for background.
The plan was initially to have `DialNext()` and `EvictNext()` return a channel. However, implementing this became unnecessarily complicated and error-prone. As an example, the channel would be both consumed and populated (via method calls) by the same driving method (e.g. `Router.dialPeers()`) which could easily cause deadlocks where a method call blocked while sending on the channel that the caller itself was responsible for consuming (but couldn't since it was busy making the method call). It would also require a set of goroutines in the peer manager that would interact with the goroutines in the router in non-obvious ways, and fully populating the channel on startup could cause deadlocks with other startup tasks. Several issues like these made the solution hard to reason about.
I therefore simply made `DialNext()` and `EvictNext()` block until the next peer was available, using internal triggers to wake these methods up in a non-blocking fashion when any relevant state changes occurred. This proved much simpler to reason about, since there are no goroutines in the peer manager (except for trivial retry timers), nor any blocking channel sends, and it instead relies entirely on the existing goroutine structure of the router for concurrency. This also happens to be the same pattern used by the `Transport.Accept()` API, following Go stdlib conventions, so all router goroutines end up using a consistent pattern as well.
The `NodeInfo` interface does not appear to serve any purpose at all, so I removed it and renamed the `DefaultNodeInfo` struct to `NodeInfo` (including the Protobuf representations). Let me know if this is actually needed for anything.
Only the Protobuf rename is listed in the changelog, since we do not officially support API stability of the `p2p` package (according to `README.md`). The on-wire protocol remains compatible.
This implements a new `Transport` interface and related types for the P2P refactor in #5670. Previously, `conn.MConnection` was very tightly coupled to the `Peer` implementation -- in order to allow alternative non-multiplexed transports (e.g. QUIC), MConnection has now been moved below the `Transport` interface, as `MConnTransport`, and decoupled from the peer. Since the `p2p` package is not covered by our Go API stability, this is not considered a breaking change, and not listed in the changelog.
The initial approach was to implement the new interface in its final form (which also involved possible protocol changes, see https://github.com/tendermint/spec/pull/227). However, it turned out that this would require a large amount of changes to existing P2P code because of the previous tight coupling between `Peer` and `MConnection` and the reliance on subtleties in the MConnection behavior. Instead, I have broadened the `Transport` interface to expose much of the existing MConnection interface, preserved much of the existing MConnection logic and behavior in the transport implementation, and tried to make as few changes to the rest of the P2P stack as possible. We will instead reduce this interface gradually as we refactor other parts of the P2P stack.
The low-level transport code and protocol (e.g. MConnection, SecretConnection and so on) has not been significantly changed, and refactoring this is not a priority until we come up with a plan for QUIC adoption, as we may end up discarding the MConnection code entirely.
There are no tests of the new `MConnTransport`, as this code is likely to evolve as we proceed with the P2P refactor, but tests should be added before a final release. The E2E tests are sufficient for basic validation in the meanwhile.