On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 21:06, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: > I didn't mean "bloody-minded" as a bad thing - I'm presently compiling > Xorg from source on various virtualised OSes just for the fun of it > and noting that no-one at all could have done a complete Xorg compile > in the last year or they would have noticed all the breakages ... > > I do think that a horribly under-resourced open source project (most > of them) can reasonably say "OK, if people want xxx supported, please > step forward" and, a year later, saying "OK, zero people came forward > to fix xxx, out it goes." It's a pretty powerful and conclusive > argument.
Keith Packard described an interesting approach to this problem (in the context of X, no less!), quoted e.g. on http://lwn.net/Articles/354408/ : 'Keith has figured out a fail-safe method for the removal of cruft from an old code base. The steps, he said, are these: 1. Publish a protocol specification and promise that there will be long-term support. 2. Realize failure. 3. "Accidentally" break things in the code. 4. Let a few years go by, and note that nobody has complained about the broken features. 5. Remove the code since it is obviously not being used. Under this model, the XCMS subsystem was broken for five years without any complaints. The DGA code has recently been seen to have been broken for as long. The technique works, so Keith encouraged the audience to "go forth and introduce bugs."' Maybe we should do the same - introduce bugs that will cause subtle breakages on browsers we'd rather not go out of our way to specifically support any longer, and see if anyone'll actually complain. :) -- schnee _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
