Prune Accord.Net Libraries

[richard-churchman]

It is hard to imagine finding time to work on this ticket, however, creating anyway.

Recently a project was concluded to upgrade from .Net 6 to .Net 8. This was a big project as some the machine learning libraries that were in use were archived. The archived code contained uses of the BinarySeralizer that was unsafe and would not build after .Net 6. The Accord.Net libraries, being written in C#, were brought into the solution and built through to .Net 8, removing all of the references to BinarySeralizer and any other obsolete code. Serialisation of Neural Networks was further complicated by there being no drop in replacement to BinarySeralizer and modifications needed to be made to make it work with Newtonsoft json serialization.

The Accord.Net libraries are massive, and the Jube use is highly partial. At some point this library code needs to be pruned to remove any methods that are not in use to reduce the ongoing maintenance cost. Mostly obsolete methods are being removed and their use swapped with not supported exceptions, and this does not appear to have caused any breaking changes in Jube.

This ticket is to examine the use of Accord.Net in Jube and remove any code that is not used, then set about refactoring code that is in use. The code is not all that bad, as it build and works under .Net 8, hence this ticket is not an immediate priority.