The Importance of Software Deprecation

Software deprecation or obsolescence may depend on the internal politics of that company because you know they may have different accounting rules for writing stuff down. The underlying engineering fact is that software needs to be maintained which may mean small tweaks here and there or it may mean refactoring. There may eventually be some kind of emergent international technical standard for how you maintain dependency trees of stuff that gets compiled. You'll presumably have some metadata that goes along with binaries which contains pointers with hash trees and digital signatures showing everything that went into that particular process. I believe in time people will develop better technical tools that will enable you to generate automatic records when you build software  of everything that went