david@lang.hm wrote:

On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, Jeff Garzik wrote:

quoted

Dirk Schoebel wrote:

quoted

 as long as the maintainer follows the kernel development things can be
 left in, if the maintainer can't follow anymore they are taken out 
quite
 fast again. (This statement mostly counts for parts of the kernel 
where a
 choice is possible or the coding overhead of making such choice 
possible
 is quite low.)

This is just not good engineering.

It is axiomatic that it is easy to add code, but difficult to remove 
code. It takes -years- to remove code that no one uses.  Long after 
the maintainer disappears, the users (and bug reports!) remain.

I'll point out that the code that's so hard to remove is the code that 
exposes an API to userspace.

True.

code that's an internal implementation (like a couple of the things 
being discussed) gets removed much faster.

Not true.  It is highly unlikely that code will get removed if it has 
active users, even if the maintainer has disappeared.

The only things that get removed rapidly are those things mathematically 
guaranteed to be dead code.

_Behavior changes_, driver removals, feature removals happen more 
frequently than userspace ABI changes -- true -- but the rate of removal 
is still very, very slow.

It is axiomatic that we are automatically burdened with new code for at 
least 10 years :)  That's what you have to assume, when accepting anything.

	Jeff



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