consider removing RelativeVirtualAddress

[williballenthin]

its not used in the code, just defined.

[corkamig]

Since the base adress is provided, RVAs are duplicate information, and absolute adresses are what disassemblers use by default.

However, other kind of tools might work with base+RVA (xDbg)
cf export from Capa's JSON https://github.com/Dump-GUY/CAPA_JsonConver/blob/master/CAPA_JsonConverv.pyw

Is it causing any risk or overhead ?

[williballenthin]

i encountered this while porting capa to another language, and found we didn't have tests or use cases for the code. so when we have dead code like this, especially in the public interface, it is an additional overhead for third parties to deal with.

if we just hypothesize how a feature could be used, the our scope will always increase and we won't have enough time/effort to finished anything.

[corkamig]

What about adding a deprecation warning then, to prevent pipelines from breaking unexpectedly ?

For example, with a warnings.warn call of a DeprecationWarning in RelativeVirtualAddress.__new__, and a new entry in test_engine.py.

[williballenthin]

we'd certainly only release this as part of a major version due to it being a breaking change.

we could do a deprecation period, i'm not opposed to this.

thanks @corkamig!

[corkamig]

Deprecation period started. Deletion planned for v3.5.0.

[williballenthin]

let's keep this open until the code is finally removed in v10 or v11, so we don't forget