[Pki-devel] [PATCH] 0015-Removal-of-unused-private-methods

[Adam Young]

On 11/16/2011 09:48 AM, Ade Lee wrote:
> I'm struggling with the premise behind this patch.  Some of these
> methods seem like they are valuable - and certainly they were valuable
> at some point in time (or they would not have been written).  On the
> other hand, I see the benefit of trimming the code base.  No need to
> refactor code that isn't being used.
>
> I realize that this removes some eclipse warnings, but is removing these
> methods good practice?
>
> I guess I'm looking for some other folks to chime in here.

My feeling is that you do not leave dead code in the code base.  The 
code still exists in the repository,  but it is unlikely that a piece of 
code that is not called today will be needed in exactly the same form in 
the future.


Code is documentation.  Code that is not used is misleading to the 
maintainer.  Committing commented out code is a bad practice.

As we refactor,  the location of the behavior of a lot of these methods 
will change.  Thus, some orphan calls will become  uncallable, and 
others will get in the way of code clean up.


This is old code:  some of it goes back 15 years.  Holding on to unused, 
uncallable code is akin to hoarding.


>
> Ade
>
> On Thu, 2011-11-10 at 22:29 -0500, Adam Young wrote:
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