One small change that was supposed to be in 5a6c18a086 but didn't make
it into the patch version that got merged, and removal of some long-dead
code.
phan objected to the use of new $class without being explicitly
reassured that $class is, in fact, a string. I don't know why.
Change-Id: Ifa00c59ab4464109414f21db37e3a6db21decdf3