A proposal for code removal prior to FreeBSD 13

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Dec 16, 2018 at 5:34 PM Mark Millard via freebsd-arch <
freebsd-arch at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Given discussions such as the one for -r341682 ( one message being
> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-head/2018-December/120994.html
> ),
> is a requirement for 64-bit atomics in order to support SMP
> going to potentially eliminate platforms like the multi-processor
> 32-bit powerpc support (some old PowerMac models are examples)?
> Should it be an example in WhatsGoing and a new ProjectPolicy?
>

Maybe. That's not a terrible idea, but we have a lot of things that are
currently just unwritten rules, and I'm not keen to write them all down. I
don't have the time. I do have the time to toss together something for
mips, and see what the implications are, so I'm limiting myself to that.


> Is there a fairly complete list of the Project Policies someplace?
> Each possibly with the matching MD requirements implications (when
> there are some)?
>

There should be a list, but there isn't. Some are well documented, others
no doubt live just in a few people's heads. I'd love to see it, but that
windmill is too large for me to tilt at. It's hard to reconstruct a list we
should have maintained incrementally over the last 25 years.

It might also not be bad to manage longer-term transitions via some kind of
roadmap that looks out a release or three. But before we can get to that
point, we need to clean up the accumulated technical debt wrt obsolescence
in the code base today.

Warner