On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 03:07:39PM -0700, Nick Desaulniers wrote: > > That's not completely correct. The standard approach to check whether or not > > a driver is still being used is to check its git history. If the number of > > contributors is low and it was several years ago that a new feature was added > > or a bug has been fixed it is likely that nobody is using that driver anymore. > > I don't disagree with you, I just don't see how what you state can be > reconciled with Linus' response in > https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/10/27/44. Those two viewpoints seem > incompatible to me, but maybe there's a nuance I'm missing? So a couple of observations. Obviously, drivers, file systems and architectures *have* been removed. It can be done; sometimes if it can be demonstrate that it can't possibly work (for example, due to bitrot, the kernel would immediately crashed if anyone tried to use the code in question :-). In other cases, drivers has been removed through the staging subsystem, sometimes by adding a "depends on BROKEN" in the Kconfig file, and seeing if anyone complains --- since removing a "depends on BROKEN" line in Kconfig is even easier than doing reverting a git commit (especially if the user downloaded a tarball instead of doing a git clone). If you've done your due diligence then the chances that you have to revert a change which disables and later removes the dead code can be pushed close to zero. The question is whether it's worth the effort. > Nathan and I are just pointing out a small fix to eliminate a small > warning, deleting all this code does kind of feels like "throwing out > the baby with the bath water." A nuclear option for what would be a > small change otherwise. Maybe it's good to discuss the EOL for > exofs/osd, but can we please decouple that conversation from the small > change Nathan and I are proposing? The second observation I'll make is that if someone is proposing a cleanup patch, it's unfair to dump on the person proposing the cleanup patch the (non-trivial) effort to drop a driver/file system/subsystem. If the maintainer wants to drop a driver/file system, that should be the maintainer's responsibiltiy; not someone proposing a cleanup/maintenance patch. - Ted
