Re: Removing old notes from the source tree

[Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Sun, 6 Aug 2017, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> There are several files in the top level of the source tree containing
> old notes about bugs, standards conformance, etc.  These have, in
> general, not been updated in at least five years.  The information in
> them _may_ still be relevant, but it's clear that they are not being
> looked at where they are.  To the extent it is still relevant, I think
> the manual and/or the wiki are better homes.

Or Bugzilla, in the case of BUGS and maybe parts of CONFORMANCE (if still 
accurate as descriptions of issues present in glibc, which may be tricky 
to determine).

> I have also copied the text of two rather more current files into the wiki:
> 
> README.pretty-printers ->
> https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Debugging/Pretty_Printers
> README.tunables -> https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Tunables
> 
> I am inclined to say that the wiki is the proper home for these and
> they should also be removed from the source tree, but I'm open to
> being persuaded otherwise.

I think these sorts of notes describing the structure of the source code 
relating to a particular feature belong with the corresponding version of 
the source code so you can readily get the version of the documentation 
relating to the version of the code you actually have (they do of course 
need to be kept up to date as the code changes).  Likewise other similar 
files such as math/README.libm-test.  This does not mean they belong at 
top level in the source tree, and where they describe possible future 
improvements I'd rather than information was either in Bugzilla (for 
clearly-defined bugs in the code with a clear way of telling whether the 
bug is fixed) or the main wiki todo list (for more open-ended ideas for 
improvement that aren't clear bugs).  manual/maint.texi (which itself is 
rather out of date at least as regards the example lists of sysdeps 
directories) may be another possible place for such information.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com