Re: Future suggestion's to assist with changes to git.

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 28, 2008, 23:59 UTC
Message-ID: <7vej48d73e.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080828233045.GE29609@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 22 quoted lines

> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 05:10:53PM -0600, Boyd Lynn Gerber wrote:
>
>> Maybe on item could be on the git web site news items could be created to  
>> announce backward compatibility changes.  I think most people do visit the 
>> main website to look for information.  Having these changes posted there  
>> or linked from the main page could be a positive method so something like  
>> this will not happen in the future.
>
> Do they? I haven't been to the git web site in quite a long time. Nor
> have I been to (for example) the vim web site. The two things I would
> personally notice are:
>
>   - a note during upgrade of my system's packages. And this is going to
>     be dependent on the packaging system used. 1.6.0 hasn't hit many
>     distributions yet, so maybe there is still time for this. Gerrit,
>     do you mind putting something into NEWS.Debian about the drop of
>     "git-*" so that people with apt-listchanges will see it?
>
>     For people building from source, we have the Release Notes, but
>     beyond that, I don't know where to put it (and I don't meant the web
>     site is a bad place -- the more places the better, but there is no
>     catch-all place).

That would help compared to doing nothing, but many people who complained in the first thread (this is the third one, by the way) was k.org users who used a machine somebody else installs the software for them. Messages during installation would not help those people.

>   - the command complaining that my use of it is deprecated. In
>     retrospect, we probably should have done this.

This is arguable. People would have get annoying messages thrown into their mailbox from their cron jobs, even before the switchover happened, which effectively means that we move the whining period from now back to the beginning of the deprecation period -- it won't reduce the amount of actual whining.