cvs commit: src ObsoleteFiles.inc

[Maxime Henrion]

Doug Barton wrote:
> Pawel Worach wrote:
> 
> >While you are at it can you add this one too.
> 
> Done. Please note for next time that you need to add a comment indicating 
> why the file was removed. This can easily be found from the CVS logs.
> 
> BTW, this is exactly why I don't like this mechanism for cleaning stale 
> files. This list was, as I predicted it would be, quite literally out of 
> date when it was committed. This is with all due respect to the effort that 
> went into producing it. It's the methodology that I'm opposed to here.
> 
> I much prefer the dynamic method suggested by myself, mezz, and others 
> which scans the directories and compares the ages of the files to a known 
> value. This not only has the benefit of not needing a static list to 
> support it, but it also has the benefit of alerting you to pieces left 
> behind when you (for example) add a NO_FOO knob to your make.conf file to 
> avoid building part of the world.
> 
> I would really like to see us reexamine the thought process behind this 
> before we invest a lot more time into the static method. I think that the 
> dynamic method will buy us more down the road.

For what it's worth, I'd love to see a mechanism similar to the
following:

- We ensure every file installed when doing an installworld gets
  installed through bsd.*.mk.  I thought this was already the case
  but ru@ told me it's not.

- We can then add some kind of special make target, for instance
  build-files-list that generates a file with all the files going
  to be installed by installworld.

- At installworld time we install this special file somewhere.

Then we can easily deduce the obsoloted files by doing a diff.  The
nice thing is that such a system doesn't depend on people keeping
a file up-to-date, and it's safer than the find(1) method because
IIRC, there are corner cases where it doesn't work.  Unless I'm
missing something, a find(1)-based mechanism couldn't handle
directories either.  Another cool thing is that if you know you
installed a system some day, but you don't have the file containing
the installed files anymore, you can just do a cvs co -D'thedate'
and run make build-files-list.  A downside of all this is that it's
probably quite computationally expensive.

Cheers,
Maxime