Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-repack doc: remove discussion of ancient caveat

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2022 18:16:02 -0700

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]> writes:

> Which I may have misread, but I understood as going beyond suggesting
> that we cover #2 over (or in addition to) #1, and into speculation that
> the change being suggested here was suspect because I hadn't carried out
> a "solid study of history".

OK, so there was a study of history, but the resulting commit did
not interpret and reflect what's significant in the history
correctly.  Sorry for mischaracterizing your mistake.

Lets put it this way.  Here is a statement:

    Since 1.6.0, people started to need to worry more about
    compatibility with 1.4.4 and older.

Now that statement, while it may be still correct, is irrelevant.
Why?

Even if there were tons of people who still use 1.6.0 (or 1.5.3 for
that matter, which happens to be one of my favorite releases in the
era), as long as nobody uses 1.4.4 or older, we can safely remove
such a statement from our end-user facing documentation set.  Some
archaeologists in us may care, but it is irrelevant to the general
public, as long as 1.4.4 or older have died out.  "As continued use
of 1.4.4 by people stopped being an issue long time ago, remove the
warning about interoperability" is the only thing we need to say
about this change.  We can add "that we needed to add in 1.6.0 era"
at the end but that is already too verbose.

Please do not be one of those folks we had to deal with in the past
who for whatever reason cannot admit that they were wrong.

Thanks.