Re: Deprecation/Removal schedule

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Sure, but we don't want to promote carrying around unmaintained programs in core Git. Its additional code which must still be tested or fixed when changes get made, like the final removal of the fsck-objects alias. Hence, its never really unmaintained... someone must do the work.

Having a maintainer means there are one or more persons in the community who are making sure that chunk of code stays current when changes are made, and bugs are being fixed when identified. It also implies the code has some use, as it is unreasonable to expect a maintainer to invest time in something which has no value.

Things that are really central in Git have at least 3 or 4 maintainers who seem to rotate the workload fairly well. But as you get closer to the outer (higher) layers it seems to fall on Junio and a much smaller group. I'd hate to see Junio spend lots of time working on things nobody uses.

Importers are especially problematic. They aren't the most heavily used programs, as people tend to convert to Git once and then don't look back. But they are also one of the first things a user has experience with as they testdrive Git on a copy of their own project. So any importers we ship `out of the box' need to Just Work Danngit(tm). Unfortunately they are also get the least amount of testing.