Automation to Place Tombstones and Clean-Up Dead Code

[scheb]

Idea

I'd like to provide some automation to

1. add tombstones to a codebase
2. remove dead code from the codebase based on the results from the tombstone library

Since Rector is the standard library for PHP code migrations now, I thought it would be a good thing to use the Rector platform, rather than building my own little code migrations tool.

In detail, it would need to provide 2 rectors:

1. Setting Tombstones

The first rector would add tombstone() function calls to each public method. There could be potentially additional filtering options, which public method to target.

public function foo() {
    // ... Some code here
}

Result after rector was applied:

public function foo() {
    tombstone();
    // ... Some code here
}

2. Deleting Dead Code

The second rector would take a result from the tombstone library (transfer format TBD), providing the information which methods are detected as "dead code". The rector would remove these dead methods from the code.

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If this idea would be useful to you, give it a +1

[jawira]

Maybe you can also add a Rector rule to remove tombstones, for example after deleting dead code we want to remove all tombstones (for performance reasons maybe) and uninstall scheb/tombstone.

[scheb]

@jawira You could easily do that with a regex ;)