obsoleting yow.el?

[Drew Adams]

When was it decided to consider yow.el obsolete?  I find no discussion in
emacs-devel or in any bug thread about it.  It seems to have been done without
discussion, for Emacs 24.4.  There is a NEWS item for it, at least.

FWIW, I disagree with this change.  Why was it made?
Was it proposed and discussed somewhere?  If not, why not?

yow.el was already discussed in 2006, when the question of copyright for the
`yow.lines' phrases came up.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-06/msg00502.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2006-06/msg00311.html

The decision was made then to keep yow.el and command `yow', but for copyright
reasons to replace the original quotations file with an almost empty yow.lines
with just a sample quotation.

That was a sensible decision.  Richard is gone now, and we get an apparently
surreptious change of yow.el to obsolescence.  Why?

What next, clandestine removal of `M-x doctor'?  Has the Texas state school
board moved in?