bug#1452: Acknowledgement (23.0.60; Problem with nextstep, longlines-mode,)

[Andrew Hyatt]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Andrew Hyatt <ahyatt@gmail.com>
>> Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2016 01:42:58 +0000
>> Cc: jwiegley@gmail.com, rgm@gnu.org, hanche@math.ntnu.no, 
>> 1452@debbugs.gnu.org
>> 
>> what I'm mostly trying to figure out is if there is *any* way to get
>> code to be completely unmaintained.
>
> I think removing it is the only way.

Yeah, I guess that's what I suspected.  It seems reasonable, as long as
we can remove things.

>
>> We are, after all, trying to reduce the number of bugs (see the
>> thread on 4k bugs) overall, and this is one way to do that. So the
>> only way people would agree on right now, is if we remove the code
>> entirely from emacs distribution. But I suspect that such a change
>> would be rejected, even from obsolete packages, because someone
>> might still be depending on them.
>
> It depends on how long the package was obsolete, I guess.
>
> We could define a policy, like a package is deleted after so-and-so
> many months/years in obsolete/.

If you think such a policy would be possible, then I'm happy to propose
it in emacs-devel.  Maybe obsolete packages can spend one major version
in obsolete, and get deleted in the next major version?  Or, maybe we
can be more aggressive, especially if you think that we can do this over
periods of months, and obsolete and deprecate based on minor version instead.