Why we sometimes drop features?

It is quite rare, but sometimes things available in one version of eLabFTW are no longer available in the next version. There could be several reasons for this:

• the feature is no longer open source: this is what happened with the image editing tools of the text editor
• the feature depends on a library or service that is no longer active/maintained
• the feature has been superseded by a superior implementation

What I wish to discuss in this post is the last point: redundancy and its associated maintenance cost. When something is no longer relevant, it’s important to get rid of it or the software becomes an unmaintainable mess!