Re: Cleaning up "contrib/" (was: git svn clone failed)

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: May 5, 2025, 07:36 UTC
Message-ID: <5ffefc29-75ee-e278-448c-9124740d02fb@gmx.de>
In-Reply-To: <aBhZHA7av8bWH9Ac@pks.im>

Hi Patrick,

On Mon, 5 May 2025, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:

Show 21 quoted lines

> On Sun, May 04, 2025 at 10:19:06AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, 2 May 2025, BERENDSEN Arnoud wrote:
> > 
> > > [... talks about `git svn` not working in Git for Windows ...]
> > 
> > In Git for Windows, `git svn` is quite a maintenance burden [... then
> > suggests to use Windows System for Linux (WSL) as a workaround ...].
> 
> I sometimes wonder whether we should move such basically-unmaintained
> scripts out of the Git repository. They do a disservice to both us and
> to our users as they create the wrong impression of being the sanctioned
> way of doing a particular task even though they have only been gathering
> dust for ages.
> 
> Many of the tools in "contrib/" fall into this category, and to the best
> of my knowledge there isn't really a clear strategy for that directory.
> So from my perspective, we should either rethink whether it is worth it
> to have "contrib/" as part of Git, or we should at least do a spring
> cleanup and drop bits that haven't seen any love in the last couple of
> years.

While I am thoroughly sympathetic to the idea of cleaning up `contrib/` (which is a mixture of things that are quite well supported, such as the Bash tab completion script, and of things that are the opposite of maintained, such as `contrib/workdir/` that should have been dropped a long time ago since it encourages relying on Git's internals and has been superseded by `git worktree`), I cannot fail to notice that `git-svn` isn't even in `contrib/`.

Instead, `git-svn` is in the same category as `git-archimport`, `git-cvsserver`, `git-cvsexportcommit` and `git-cvsimport`, i.e. Git commands that tried to facilitate transitioning from specific version control systems that had been a lot more common than Git at the time, but no longer are. Maybe `git-svn` is not quite as obsolete as the other commands in that category, but they are all merely dust collectors in Git's codebase.

Ciao, Johannes