I really don't see the point of removing these from the tree. I just don't see greater value from removal, vs retention.
Sure you can remove their compilation in GENERIC by #'ing them there. That I can understand. But if you remove the lines, noone can ever use them again because they won't know the locator information, so you are making a decision for others. Same thing with the stanzas in dev/isa/files.isa; if you remove those then noone else can ever use the code. If that is your goal, look at it this way. You talk about time. Removing them won't save you time; you just spent time looking for some of the bits, and your diff is nowhere near complete. There will be bits everywhere all the way through the tree all the way to the man pages, which you'll end up leaving for others, so others will be compelled to clean that up, and not do something else. That's a real time loss. I'm writing this mail, which is a time loss. Secondly, those drivers are not standing in the way of any changes in the tree. We are not changing any API they depend on. There are too many of these drivers to even consider changing an API that all of these drivers depend on, and you will not attritition them down to a manageable subset in any case. Third, we don't know if someone is running them or not. dmesglog is not authoritative.
