Hi,
I wouldn't delete any "old" components. There is a
feature request for
making JIRA issues archivable (just as versions), but that's not there yet
and they don't have immediate plans to do so. If the legacy components
really bother you, you might consider to rename them ("xxx_optimizer") so
they only show up at the end in drop-downs.
What is the problem with the deleting old components. They are jsut categorizations
of the issues and are not referenced anywhere (eg in the changelog).
As long as the change logs stay intact I don't see a problem with deleting them
(just the component, not any issues assigned to them).
Prepending 'xxx' is one way of doing it, but I just hate how it looks.
--Hardy