How about removing non-Linux code?

[Dmitry V. Levin]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 04:18:32PM +0100, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> On 02/07/2012 04:05 PM, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:
> >> What do you think about removing all non-Linux code after the next release?
> >
> > I'm inclined to think it would be better to remove that dead code.
> >
> > I actually played with that idea a bit, and found out that something like
> > 	unifdef -DLINUX -Dlinux -USUNOS4 -USVR4 -UUNIXWARE -UFREEBSD \
> > 		-USUNOS4_KERNEL_ARCH_KLUDGE -UHAVE_MP_PROCFS \
> > 		-UHAVE_POLLABLE_PROCFS -UHAVE_PR_SYSCALL -UUSE_PROCFS
> > could be a good starting point.
> 
> Ping me when it's ok with you for this to be done.

What delayed my decision to go ahead and kick the dead code out is that
I was not 100% sure it's really dead.

For example, we know that strace does not compile on FreeBSD for quite
a few years, but it's also known that some folks were patching their
strace port several years ago without sending fixes back to us.

Another example, Debian/Ubuntu still use strace 4.5.20 just because they
have no active maintainer to update the version, but they still release
NMU's to resolve their build issues.

There seems to be no evidence of any attempt to use strace >= 4.6 on
a non-Linux platform, though.

So the question is, can we treat a port as dead if we know it doesn't
compile more than three years and we have no feedback about it?
I think the answer is yes.
Should we take into consideration that somebody might be taking new
versions of strace and silently fixing them, even if it is quite
unlikely and there is no evidence?
I think we shouldn't.

So, since there were no objections, let's go ahead and kick the dead code out.


-- 
ldv
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