It can be reasonable to #if 0 a block of tricky code during a refactoring, just so that you can quickly cross the bridge to a working state. But removing it at

It can be reasonable to #if 0 a block of tricky code during a refactoring, just so that you can quickly cross the bridge to a working state. But removing it at that stage will make it impossible for the VCS to track changes to that piece of code, which makes it much harder to restore the functionality afterwards. The RAID/LVM removal from Palimpsest followed a similar pattern (code deleted during a rewrite of an underlying library), but the developer was willing to work on reinstating it. Here we don't really know what Persch thinks — though damn the users is a tempting guess.