Re: Removal of VAX/VMS support

[Nick Clifton <nickc at redhat dot com>]

Hi Guys,

  From following the discussion on this topic I think that two
  points arise:

    * We need a mechanism to mark ports as obsolete and then remove
      them.

      Hence I am going to check in my patch to config.bfd.  I will
      just put the vax-vms port in the obsolete list for now.


    * We need a policy for deciding when ports should be marked as
      obsolete and when they should be removed.

      There appears to be two approaches - active removal and passive
      removal.  With active removal we mark a port as obsolete
      whenever it no longer has a maintainer.  With passive removal
      you wait until a port is reported as not working by somebody on
      the list and then nobody offers to fix the problem.

      With both approaches I think that the right thing to do is to
      first mark the port as obsolete but not to delete it until after
      the next major release.  Thus giving someone a chance to come
      forward and offer to maintain the port.

      For now I think that we should go with the passive approach.
      There are lots of binutils ports which do not currently have a
      maintainer but which nevertheless still work, and presumably,
      are still being used.  I think that deleting them would be a
      mistake.

      If someone feels that a particular port should be marked as
      obsolete then they should post to the list, explaining why.

Cheers
        Nick
        
bfd/ChangeLog        
2003-08-01  Nick Clifton  <nickc@redhat.com>

	* config.bfd: Add code to catch obsolete configurations and warn
	about them unless --enable-obsolete is used.  Use this to mark
	vax-vms port as obsolete.