Curtis L. Olson writes:

 > I know you are making a point by using extereme wording, but if you
 > are running through the woods, it doesn't hurt to look up once in a
 > while.

I preached full interface design in advance through much of the 1990s
-- it seemed like a good idea.  I now freely renounce that view.  Dead
code is just too expensive to keep around; I'm willing to bet that
FlightGear contributors spend more time trying to understand existing
code (including mine) than writing new code.

 > Perhaps you misunderstand my position.  It's one thing to delete
 > crufty old useless code.  However, there may be reasons to keep old
 > code #ifdef'd in.

This is where we disagree -- keeping it in makes the code much harder
for new (and existing) contributors to read and understand, gives
false hits when searching for variables and method calls, etc. etc.
With CVS, it's trivially easy to look at or restore old code later if
we need to; I'm strongly in favour of keeping the onscreen code short,
clean, and uncluttered.  Unlike the XP people, however, I am a big
supporter of explanatory comments.

There are parts of FlightGear that have a single, well-known
maintainer (such as YASim or WeatherCM), but a lot of the dead code is
in the well-trodden public corridors of FlightGear, like fg_init.cxx,
main.cxx, etc.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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