Subject: Re: [PATCH] remove dead tcp exports
From: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>
To: Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>,
       Werner Almesberger <wa@almesberger.net>, hch@lst.de, davem@redhat.com,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
In-Reply-To: <1098765665.9404.5.camel@krustophenia.net>
References: <20041024134309.GB20267@lst.de>
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	 <20041025204147.667ee2b1.davem@davemloft.net>
	 <1098765665.9404.5.camel@krustophenia.net>
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Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 10:40:51 +0200
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On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 00:41 -0400, Lee Revell wrote:

> Is this really a compelling reason to remove them?  For example ALSA
> provides an API for driver writers, just because a certain function
> happens not to be used by any does not mean is never will be or that it
> should not.

sometimes such "spurious" exports still make sense. Most of the time
they don't, and during these cleanups we've found several functions for
which the only "user" was the export, eg entirely dead code. 
Also nobody in the entire tree using a part of the API is a pretty good
sign that the API isn't good or even supposed to be used. (again,
exceptions possible, which is why cleaning this stuff is manual work and
not a script to just nuke it all)
-- 

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