coding style question about obsoleted packages

Robert P. J. Day
2020-04-29T09:28:27Z

just noticed that, in master branch, kbd recipe quite reasonably
distinguishes itself from the much, much older console-tools package
thusly:

RREPLACES_${PN} = "console-tools"
RPROVIDES_${PN} = "console-tools"
RCONFLICTS_${PN} = "console-tools"

all perfectly reasonable as long as console-tools actually existed as
a recipe, but it was deleted some months ago:

commit 320319f24dd1be300bc89c52b97d1703eab83029
Author: Alexander Kanavin <alex.kanavin@gmail.com>
Date: Wed Nov 20 14:44:51 2019 +0100

console-tools: remove the recipe

The last release of this was in 2002(!), kbd is the modern,
supported alternative.

and as best i can tell, there are no references to console-tools in
the numerous layers i have checked out. under the circumstances, then,
while it doesn't hurt to have that info above in the kbd recipe, is
there any value?

more generally, when a recipe is truly removed and obsoleted, should
it be part of the removal process to get rid of such references to it
to avoid slowly-accumulating cruft in the code base?

rday

p.s. YP reference maual, "migration to 3.1" section, does indeed
mention that console-tools is deleted, but neglects to mention its
replacement with kbd ... i've made a note of that and will add that
along with other changes to the ref manual at some point for clarity.