Official procedure for feature removal ? / was: Re: Dead code: programs/Xserver/iplan2p[248]

[Alex Deucher]

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 12:22:28 +0200 (IST), Ely Levy
<elylevy-xserver at cs.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Adam Jackson wrote:
> 
> > On Monday 04 October 2004 21:31, Roland Mainz wrote:
> > > Adam Jackson wrote:
> > > > These three directories appear to be completely abandoned.  I can't find
> > > > any reference to them in any of the live configs or Imakefiles.
> > > > According to xf86's CVS history they haven't been substantially modified
> > > > in eight years. Unless someone speaks on their behalf within, say, two
> > > > weeks, these three are getting deleted.
> > >
> > > It would be nice if you could file a bug into bugzilla to track that
> > > issue (and for the .../Xserver/ilbm/ code, too) that there is an
> > > official record of the removal.
> >
> > But of course, #1534 and #1535.  Hopefully it's obvious that "RFD" stands for
> > "Request for Deprecation".
> >
> > > BTW: What about setting up an official procedure for such a feature
> > > removal similar to what Sun does in Solaris: First they annouce the
> > > removal of a feature ("EOL notice", "EOS notice"(=end-of-support)) in
> > > their release notes and then one of the _following_ releases then
> > > removes it (e.g. there is always one release cycle time for customers to
> > > scream&rant)).
> >
> > Definitely.  gcc uses the same process to deprecate outdated or unmaintained
> > targets, and it seems to work pretty well there.  My only complaint would be
> > that it would have been really nice to have some deprecation warnings in the
> > 6.8 release notes.  Oh well.
> >
> > If we did decide on such a policy, would I have to restore xf24_32bpp to the
> > build?  I cut it since no in-tree driver uses it anymore, and the only one
> > that did use it required a non-default configuration to use it.
> >
> > - ajax
> 
> Gcc uses that to remove dead targets not dead code, if there is a code
> that nothing uses why wait a whole 2 release cycles before removing it?
> things change and get rewritten and code gets removed.
> The only thing I guess is to ask netbsd people what they use that code
> for.

I haven't looked at the code but I get the impression nothing uses it
and it doesn't even build, so if someone comes out of the woodwork and
wants to ressurect it, it can be pulled out of cvs with minimal
trouble.  At that point the "current state" of the code won't be any
different than it is now.

Alex

> 
> Ely
>