I'm torn on this patch. Obviously, the current case is not good. We shouldn't have dead code around. But it is possible that we should in fact use a "best" for the dot formatting problem, and the failure to do so may lead to some of the random formatting issues we see in our regtests.
It's not clear to me that the optimal solution to this is to remove the best. It might be better to keep the best and put in a FIXME that points out it is unused. I did some work a few years a go on the dot_column code, but never got it ready for submission. I will look into my code tonight when I get home and see how I handled the "best" issue. My bottom line is that the current system is definitely broken. I'm not sure if the best fix is to remove the unused code (which will hide the potential brokenness of the dot_column creation) or to highlight the unused code as being broken. https://codereview.appspot.com/583100043/