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Re: Removal of VAX/VMS support


DJ Delorie <dj@delorie.com> writes:
> We won't support them.  But I see no sense in removing them "just
> because".  Either we know they're broken, or we don't.  If we don't
> know, there's no point wasting time even deleting them.  Just ignore
> them, maybe they work and maybe they don't.  If we find out they don't
> work later, then delete them.

I'll be cautious about applying GDB's lessons to BFD, but here's why
there is sense in doing so for GDB:

For GDB, marking ports as obsolete and eventually deleting them has
the advantage that clients of old interfaces to core functionality
gradually disappear.  Once they're all gone, you can delete whatever
cruft in the core was supporting the old interfaces, which often frees
you up to do better things with the core.  I can't wait until the
clients of the old stack unwinding interfaces are gone from GDB ---
that stuff is hard to reason about, and easy to use wrong.  But
because Andrew goes around threatening to delete ports if they don't
get reworked to use the new interfaces (that's not quite an accurate
description of the tactic, but it's something like that), they will
eventually no longer be present to confuse people.


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