On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 21:06, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> 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