Re: [Gnash-dev] Removal candidates

[John Gilmore]

Please stop removing things from gnash, and restore the ones that have
been removed.  There is no consensus to remove these things, even if
they don't currently work.  Doing it in the absence of consensus just
creates unnecessary friction among the few remaining developers.

When a volunteer comes along who wants to revive that corner of the
project, it will be much harder for them to do so if they have to root
around in ancient releases just to find a copy of the formerly-working
code base.

As someone who still runs machines with ancient Unix / Linux releases,
I really appreciate when a software project that doesn't "support" my
old environments still makes it possible for me to get their code
running on those environments in an hour -- and post back the changes
so everyone can benefit.  The alternative, projects that drop support
for anything that they can't currently test nor personally care about,
mean I have to keep running old releases, and if I need new bugfixes
or features, I have to either port them into the old release, or port
the old support for my machine into the new release.  Both of those
take much longer than the hour needed to fix little stuff that breaks,
like when I run ./configure or make, or when a struct initializer
doesn't contain new members added since last time it was tested.

        John

PS: I just today built openssl-1.0.0d and bind-9.8.0 on an ancient
machine, and found exactly one such problem, which I'm about to report
back the patch for.