After several refactorings to WikiController, finally the #special method isn’t pretending to be a traffic cop anymore (routing to other methods). Since it doesn’t have any other purpose now, I’m going to use remove method to toss it into the bit bucket.

Before

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class WikiController  'export', :id => @project # Compatibility stub while refactoring
      return
    else
      # requested special page doesn't exist, redirect to default page
      redirect_to :action => 'index', :id => @project, :page => nil
      return
    end
    render :action => "special_#{page_title}"
  end
end

After

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class WikiController < ApplicationController
  # No more special
end

I love the refactorings when I can throw away old code. What is surprising to me, is that the refactoring catalog doesn’t have a remove method as a refactoring. Should it not be a refactoring? Or is it that programmers don’t remove code enough for it to be considered a common pattern?

Reference commit