Re: Dead or unused face handling code

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> From: Dmitry Antipov <dmantipov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2016 09:57:03 +0300
> 
> I've found a few dummy/unused bits around face_at_xxx functions, and running
> with these patches (which see) for a few days without any problems. But since
> redisplay is very tricky, I don't feel brave enough to install them without
> having some feedback first...

I'm sorry, but I don't want to make these changes, for a couple of
reasons:

 . Changes like these are similar to whitespace changes, so they are
   generally okay as part of a larger changeset that fixes a real
   problem or adds a feature.  But when done alone, they are just
   nuisance: they make forensics harder for no good reason.  They also
   risk introducing bugs, and we don't really have a test suite for
   the display engine to be sure we didn't screw up anything.

 . The functionality you are proposing to delete is useful, even if
   currently largely unused.  We are extremely short on people who can
   resurrect this code if it is ever needed in the future; I'm not
   sure how many people here even know how to begin writing such code.
   (Looking up deleted code in Git history is not trivial, many people
   simply don't know how to do that, and won't try in the first place,
   because they won't know such code ever existed.)  So by deleting
   these seemingly unneeded bits, we will forever lose non-trivial
   baggage that no one on board, except maybe yours truly, can
   restore.

Thanks.