On 22.02.2021 11:20, Michał Górny wrote:
On Sun, 2021-02-21 at 13:04 -0800, Gregory P. Smith wrote:
The main thing from a project maintenance perspective is for platforms
to
not become a burden to other code maintainers. PRs need to be
reviewed.
Every #if/#endif in code is a cognitive burden. So being a minor
platform
can come with unexpected breakages that need fixing due to other
changes
made in the codebase that did not pay attention to the platform. As
we
cannot expect everyone working on code to care about anything beyond
the
tier-1 fully supported platforms, buildbot or not.
I have to disagree -- the support code (even if any is actually
necessary) does not have to be a burden. Generally 'hobbyists' don't
have a problem that the support for their platform becomes broken
accidentally, or even deliberately because it blocks something else.
They understand that others don't have hardware, time or motivation
to maintain support for their platform properly.
They themselves have limited time to work on it. So it's entirely fine
for things to break occasionally, and they provide fixes as their time
permits. They don't ask others to maintain their code. There's no real
maintenance burden involved.
But there is. As was pointed to above, the extra legacy code makes making _any_ changes in the corresponding part of the file more difficult
-- because one has to think how to combine the changes with that code.
E.g.: at which side of that code to place the changes; if it's a part of a block statement, where in the block statement to place the
changes; if I want to change the program structure, how to incorporate that code into the new structure -- all made much more difficult
because I cannot be sure what changes would and wouldn't break the "legacy" code.
So, by your logic, it would be "blocking" any change to that file and will have to be removed anyway the first time we change that file.
Now, if that's the case -- why should we spent time and effort tracking which files were "cleansed" and which weren't (which we'll have to
do because such cleansing is an unrelated change in a PR so a PR's author should know whether they need to look out to do any "cleansing" as
well as making the change that does what they want) if we can cleanse them all at once and be done with it?
In fact, this whole thread feels like removing 80%-complete translations
from a program because they 'burden developers' and confuse users. Even
if the translations are not actively updated and degenerates with
strings changing, some users find them helpful.
--
Regards,
Ivan
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