Re: [gnugo-devel] Post 3.4 cleaning

[Gunnar Farneback]

I wrote:
> In order to keep the sources maintainable (and accessible to
> newcomers) it is necessary to regularly clean out obsoleted and
> otherwise unused code. Currently there's quite a lot of code which is
> no longer of much interest. I propose to remove the following pieces
> of code, but not until after GNU Go 3.4 is out. Some of them might be
> somewhat controversial, so please tell if you disagree about them.
> 
> * unused komaster schemes
> 
> When the komaster schemes were developed it was very useful to be able
> to quickly change between them. For more than a year now komaster
> scheme 5 has been default and doesn't seem to have any problems so
> this is no longer of much interest. This would remove some 600 lines
> in the very central board code.

Removed by gunnar_5_1.3. 

> * support for !experimental_connections
> 
> Experimental connections, which (currently) affect how the dragon
> amalgamation is performed, have been default since 3.3.11. Removing
> support for nonexperimental connections would simplify code in several
> places, primarily in dragon.c, shape.c, patterns/connections.c, and
> conn.db. It can be argued that it's still valuable to be able to see
> where the experimental connections fail but the non-experimental
> don't, but on the whole I don't think this is worth the added code
> complexity any longer. It seems very unlikely that anybody would want
> to work on improvements of the old code.

Removed by gunnar_5_1.4. I did not remove the experimental_connections
variable and configure option. Although now without effect, I imagine
we may want to do new experimental connection experiments in the near
future, e.g. to better handle amalgamation in the presence of
connection intransitivities.

> * old semeai code
> 
> The experimental semeai code works well enough now that we no longer
> need the fallback to the old semeai code. Clearly nobody has had any
> interest in improving the old code for several years now.

Removed by gunnar_5_1.5. Here as well the experimental_semeai variable
and configure option remains.

> * small_semeai()
> 
> Small_semeai() was disabled when it became clear that it was causing
> significant trouble without giving much, if any, benefit anymore. I
> think it's clear that it does not represent a viable approach and that
> further improvement in understanding of small-scale semeais must be
> integrated directly into the tactical reading.

Removed by gunnar_5_1.6.

All these patches are linked from the development web page. Together
they shorten the GNU Go sources by 2500 lines.

> * interface/html/*
> 
> The code in this directory implements a cgi interface for GNU Go which
> works by starting a GNU Go process for each move and feeding it an sgf
> file of the moves so far. This code is very old (it was designed for
> GNU Go 2.4, almost 4 years ago) and I'm not sure whether anybody has
> used it for a long time or whether it even works anymore. The mode of
> operation does not take any advantage of the persistent caching
> schemes and I'm doubtful that it's a reasonable setup at all
> considering the relative slowness of modern versions of GNU Go. If
> there is concensus I think we could remove this before 3.4.

Removed directly in CVS.

/Gunnar