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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 19, 2022, 01:16 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqk089ewbx.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <220718.86tu7eyhvz.gmgdl@evledraar.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> 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.