[email protected] wrote:
On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, Jeff Garzik wrote:
Dirk Schoebel wrote:
as long as the maintainer follows the kernel development things can be
left in, if the maintainer can't follow anymore they are taken out
quite
fast again. (This statement mostly counts for parts of the kernel
where a
choice is possible or the coding overhead of making such choice
possible
is quite low.)
This is just not good engineering.
It is axiomatic that it is easy to add code, but difficult to remove
code. It takes -years- to remove code that no one uses. Long after
the maintainer disappears, the users (and bug reports!) remain.
I'll point out that the code that's so hard to remove is the code that
exposes an API to userspace.
True.
code that's an internal implementation (like a couple of the things
being discussed) gets removed much faster.
Not true. It is highly unlikely that code will get removed if it has
active users, even if the maintainer has disappeared.
The only things that get removed rapidly are those things mathematically
guaranteed to be dead code.
_Behavior changes_, driver removals, feature removals happen more
frequently than userspace ABI changes -- true -- but the rate of removal
is still very, very slow.
It is axiomatic that we are automatically burdened with new code for at
least 10 years :) That's what you have to assume, when accepting anything.
Jeff
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