Subject: Re: [1.8.0] Remove deprecated commands

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:56:20 -0600

René Scharfe wrote:

> How did you search for current usage?  How comprehensive are the results?

By searching for "peek-remote" at http://www.google.com/codesearch

I tried to check out all hits that weren't just enumerating git
commands, but that doesn't rule out unindexed or non-public use.
No interesting hits.

But that's pretty weird, given that there was no deprecation
notice, nor anything else to encourage a transition.

*checks history*

Ah, peek-remote and ls-remote seem to have been introduced at the same
time.  ls-remote could use all git-supported protocols, while
peek-remote could only use git protocol.  So very few people had
reason to use peek-remote, anyway.

> Am 02.02.2011 01:57, schrieb Jonathan Nieder:

>>>    git-repo-config  2008-01-17       git config
>>
>> giggle[1] still uses it
[...]
>> Likewise darcs2git[2] and the stgit testsuite.
[...]
> Well, the release notes for 1.5.4 promised that the "next feature
> release will remove it".  Perhaps notifying the developers of the
> projects you discovered is enough?

The list is probably not exhaustive.  On the bright side, repo-config
tends to be run in user-visible contexts, so I think a deprecation
notice could be effective.

> That said, the benefit for final removal of this command, which is
> effectively just an alias, is the smallest of the four.

After adding a deprecation notice and filing some bugs, I think we
can forget about it and wait another year. ;-)

>>>    git-tar-tree     2007-11-08       git archive
[...]
>> pilgrim[3] uses tar-tree in its "make dist" target.  I wouldn't be
>> surprised if some other projects use it in a similar way.
>
> Possibly, and this shows that deprecation warnings don't fully solve
> the problem of educating users to switch to the replacements.
>
> I think it's relatively safe to remove the command anyway because
> the users in this case are developers and packagers

I agree.  The remaining users look like holdouts that will be hard to
get at by other means.