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    SubjectRe: [Ksummit-discuss] [TECH TOPIC] Planning code obsolescence
    On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 05:00:12PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
    > The majority of the code in the kernel deals with hardware that was made
    > a long time ago, and we are regularly discussing which of those bits are
    > still needed. In some cases (e.g. 20+ year old RISC workstation support),
    > there are hobbyists that take care of maintainership despite there being
    > no commercial interest. In other cases (e.g. x.25 networking) it turned
    > out that there are very long-lived products that are actively supported
    > on new kernels.
    >
    > When I removed support for eight instruction set architectures in 2018,
    > those were the ones that no longer had any users of mainline kernels,
    > and removing them allowed later cleanup of cross-architecture code that
    > would have been much harder before.
    >
    > I propose adding a Documentation file that keeps track of any notable
    > kernel feature that could be classified as "obsolete", and listing
    > e.g. following properties:
    >
    > * Kconfig symbol controlling the feature
    >
    > * How long we expect to keep it as a minimum
    >
    > * Known use cases, or other reasons this needs to stay
    >
    > * Latest kernel in which it was known to have worked
    >
    > * Contact information for known users (mailing list, personal email)
    >
    > * Other features that may depend on this
    >
    > * Possible benefits of eventually removing it

    We had this once, in the form of feature-removal-schedule.txt. It was,
    itself, removed in commit 9c0ece069b32e8e122aea71aa47181c10eb85ba7.

    I *do* think there'd be value in having policies and processes for "how
    do we carefully remove a driver/architecture/etc we think nobody cares
    about". That's separate from having an actual in-kernel list of "things
    we think we can remove".

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