With the activity on 1.6 development taking up again I though it to be
good to post a followup to the discussion I started in May this year
about the removal of legacy libraries and legacy code from 1.6. The
original thread can be found here :
http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-devel/browse_thread/thread/2a36...

I just wanted to give a quick update and put all the work done so far
on this into one topic so it can be easily tracked for documentation
purposes later.

The following is an overview of the refactoring tasks done so far :

 - Removed administrator/includes/pcl
 - Removed folder and file placeholders from application includes
directories
 - Removed libraries/bitfolge/feedcreator
 - Cleaned up legacy plugin for 1.6
 - Removed 1.0 legacy code
 - Removed hack to support PHP5 style constructors in PHP4
 - Removed hack to support PHP5 style destructors in PHP4
 - Removed _parseURL function from JURI, replaced by parse_url
 - Removed index2.php and index3.php entry files
 - Removed backlink plugin
-  Removed phpinputfilter library, replaced by JInputFilter
-  Removed phputf8, moved mbstring and iconv implementation into
JString
-  Removed libraries/bitfolge/vcard
-  Removed  Backlink plugin removed
-  Removed legacy support from mod_mainmenu
-  Removed patTemplate library
 - Removed PEAR class removed due to license conflict
 - Removed Archive_tar class removed due to license conflict
-  Added JDocumentVCARD format (Implemented new Vcard format in
contact component)
 - Moved framework to PHP5 strict

This almost completes the refactoring I outlined in my original
proposal. The following is still on the todo list :

1. joomla/domit

DOMit has been deprecated for 1.5 and isn't maintained since a few
years now. With the excellent XML support in PHP5 this library could
be easily replaced with build-in PHP5 functions. Seen the fact that
the XML needs of the core are limited (we  only need to be able to
parse smaller xml files) I would propose to replace DOMit and
JSimpleXML with an extended class of PHP5's SimpleXML implementation.
SimpleXML offers support for Xpath since PHP5.2 and this is all we
need for the core as for most 3P extensions.

2. joomla/phpmailer

Hasn't received any bug fixes or updates in years, prone to security
issues. Propose to replace by SwiftMailer (http://
www.swiftmailer.org/)

Next would be a round of library updates, like simplepie, tcpdf,
phpxmlrpc, all have php strict equivalents we could start to be using.
I'll put that into a next topic.

Cheers,

Johan