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Garbage deletion
- From: Colin Douglas Howell <chowell2 at pacbell dot net>
- To: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 12:17:42 -0700
- Subject: Garbage deletion
One of the beginner GCC projects is:
* Delete garbage.
#if 0 blocks that have been there for years, unused functions,
unused entire files, dead configurations, dead Makefile logic,
dead RTL and tree forms, and on and on and on. Depending on what
it is, it may not be obvious if it's garbage or not. Go for the
easy ones first.
I presume this project is still relevant.
"#if 0" blocks seems really easy, and I've already found a fair number.
"cvs annotate" shows that some date back to the founding of the current
CVS repository (11-Aug-97). So how old should an "#if 0" block be
before it's considered garbage? One year, two years, or longer?
Also, some of these "#if 0" blocks have had changes made inside them
which are newer than the "#if 0" line itself; in other words, people
have been patching disabled blocks. This would make sense if someone
is doing cleanups, since you don't want an inconsistent cleanup, but
the block as a whole should still be considered to be old garbage,
right?
I assume that there shouldn't be any questions about whether an "#if 0"
block is garbage, provided that its old enough, since it will be unused
regardless of the compilation circumstances.
I plan to (finally) file a copyright assignment form, but is such a form
necessary for garbage deletion patches? (Can text removal be considered
copyrighted material? :)
Colin