[noir_lord]

one-off files have a habit of hanging around and temporary often becomes permanent.

This isn't to say that you should treat all one-off's and temporary solutions as permanenent but it is a good idea to audit them periodically.

Storing that kind of metadata about code is something I've often pondered we could do better, putting it in comments is a nasty hack, storing it away from the code means it instantly gets out of date, commit messages are not a good place to put that stuff either.

I've never come up with an elegant solution even in my head but it would be something I'd love to have for my own uses.

[jeffasinger]

Agreed.

Someone once came into my office and asked why the email export feature had stopped working. Once they described going to test.php, I realized that about a month ago, I had migrated our version control system to a new deployment system, and hadn't included test.php, what I thought to be an insecure relic left hanging around by a predecessor.

Things that end up on a live web server are one offs much less than the people who make them think.

[noir_lord]

nice and eerily familiar.

Codebase I once worked on, I found a /csv route that dropped the entire customer database in CSV format and /route_csv that enumerated all the routes the application had including admin and cron routes :| (denial of service by spamming the cron routes that did no access checking was the least of it).

When I checked the commit date it was 19 months ago..and in production for 17 months :|

The midden and the windmill fully hit each other that day.