Policies to retire functionality
Draft of thorn and parameter retirement policies
At release time, the main Einstein Toolkit thornlist in the manifest [1] should only contain thorns that are supported and actively maintained. Thorns that do not meet these requirements at candidates for retirements.
In order to retire a thorn or parameter it needs to be marked as deprecated for at least one release. Deprecation notices appear in the release announement. For parameters we would like a means to mark them as deprecated in param.ccl, thorns are to be marked as deprecated in the thornlist. Deprecated thorn are to be listed on the ET website. In order for a thorn to be retired, no other thorn's testsuite may depend on it, unless the test is designed to only test the to-be-retired test.