Re: [rfa/i386] Make codestream deprecated?

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 03:18:19PM -0500, Andrew Cagney wrote:
> >Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com> writes:
> >
> >
> >>2002-12-01  Andrew Cagney  <ac131313@redhat.com>
> >>
> >>	* i386-tdep.c: Replace `codestream' with `deprecated_codestream'.
> >
> >
> >Sorry, but I'm not really enthousiastic about this patch.  IMHO a
> >comment explaining the reason why one shouldn't copy this bit of code
> >would be much better.  I'm willing to rip out this bit of code, and
> >replace it with something cleaner and simpler, but this "deprication"
> >is only noise to me.
> 
> I'll add a comment.  Briefly it will read:
> 
> ``The deprecated codestream mechanism is entirely redundant.  The dcache 
> superseeds it, providing a generic mechanism for caching both 
> instruction and data values.  If the dcache has problems or limitations 
> than that, and not this code, needs to be fixed.''

Except we don't _use_ the dcache, normally.  And my last attempts to
enable it by default met with a pretty crummy reaction.  And the last
time I benchmarked using the dcache I got worse results than without
it.

[And you spelled supersedes incorrectly :)]

> While you might think of marking this as deprecated as noice, as I noted 
> to Daniel, it has a very real and direct objective:
> 
> >Been there, tried that.  As best I can tell, the only thing that makes 
> >someone stop and think, is the word deprecated in the name.  Coders don't 
> >always read the comments, reviewers can't keep track of everything that is 
> >being eliminated :-/
> 
> If I don't do this, I find I get a (lets say) less than favourable 
> reception when asking a contributor to not [re]use a mechanism 
> identified as deprecated via either a comment or bug report.  cf, this 
> very code block when cloned into another architecture; or the regcache 
> code before I went through and marked much of that as deprecated.

Maybe I just have a short memory, but when has that happened?  That
you've pointed out that something was marked deprecated before it was
reused, and gotten a bad reception?

Besides: this is why you should _remove_ them, rather than just
commenting them, if you want them to go away.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer