To the extent that that is true in some abstract sense, it&#x27;s difficult to manifest it in real actions. Pick a feature you think is unused. Suppose hypothetically you could wave a wand and remove it. What are the odds that A: at least one current user would be impacted B: at least one major platform and C: a majority of users will be impacted at some point (i.e., something in their Debian stack ended up using it and perhaps needing it)?<p>The problem isn&#x27;t even that the answers to those question are bad and preclude all changes... the problem is that there isn&#x27;t even a concrete method for determining the answer! And you only need to have experience with trying to remove one or two features before the desire will be seared out of you by firebrands wielded by angry crowds.<p>I&#x27;ve tried to remove much simpler &quot;obviously unused features&quot; out of much smaller codebases in environments all under the control of one corporation and gotten burned pretty bad, to say nothing of autotool&#x27;s scope.