[GNC-dev] Removing "unused" code

[Mike Alexander]

I would like to request that we avoid removing code that is thought to 
be unused, but which may in fact be used, just for the sake of cleaning 
things up.  I use a couple of reports that are not part of the standard 
GnuCash distribution and every now and then they stop working because 
something they depend on is gone.  Since some of these are reports I 
didn't write it's often a nuisance to fix them.

In particular I like the EGuile budget report written by Benoit 
Blancard, et al.  It stopped working after commit 4e38b68 which removed 
a number of parameters from gnc:html-acct-table including account-name 
which this report uses.  Assuming something is unused everywhere just 
because no built-in report uses it is not a safe assumption.

Rather than try to figure out what to use instead and how to fix it I 
just reverted that change, but this may cause me trouble later if 
something else is done that depends on this change.

I understand that cleaning up code and removing dead code are good 
things to do, but I think this is going too far.

Mike