Revert inline threshold option

[drdavella]

This feature has proved to be too problematic to be supported in an official release. The semantics are unfortunately rather complicated due to the fact that the same AsdfFile object can be used both for reading and for writing. It also turns out that there already exists an option to write_to called auto_inline that serves a similar purpose, although I believe it may not be working properly in all cases (see #599).

Also, to complicate matters further, neither inline_threshold nor auto_inline are idempotent, meaning that both modify the underlying AsdfFile object in undesirable ways. This has exposed some significant design warts in the asdf API and implementation that need to be addressed, although that will be difficult and will probably lead to significant user-facing changes.

I hope to revisit this and address the issues in an upcoming PR, but I have begun to consider whether we need to make some significant design changes for 3.0.

cc @jdavies-st

[stsci-bot]

Hi there @drdavella 👋 - thanks for the pull request! I'm just a friendly 🤖 that checks for issues related to the changelog. I help make sure that this pull request is milestoned and labeled correctly. This is mainly intended for the maintainers, so if you are not a maintainer you can ignore this, and a maintainer will let you know if any action is required on your part 😃.

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[stsci-bot]

Hi there @drdavella 👋 - thanks for the pull request! I'm just a friendly 🤖 that checks for issues related to the changelog. I help make sure that this pull request is milestoned and labeled correctly. This is mainly intended for the maintainers, so if you are not a maintainer you can ignore this, and a maintainer will let you know if any action is required on your part 😃.

Everything looks good from my point of view! 👍

If there are any issues with this message, please report them here.

[coveralls]

Coverage decreased (-0.5%) to 94.764% when pulling 8b4be8c on drdavella:revert-inline-threshold into 34030bb on spacetelescope:master.

[drdavella]

This PR retains the tests that were added and also retains a helper function for deciding when to inline since those will be useful for any future work and I don't want to lose them.