Re: tortoiseplink ssh variant still needed?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 23, 2021, 21:53 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqtuh79zmq.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <dad761bf-3121-8934-fad6-78610bc21121@cs-ware.de>

Sven Strickroth <email@cs-ware.de> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> IIRC tortoiseplink was initially created by TortoiseCVS which is
> nowadays not maintained any more 
> (<http://www.tortoisecvs.org/download.shtml>).
> In TortoiseSVN and TortoiseGit tortoiseplink was modified six years
> ago (around 2015-03-07) to ignore the "--batch" parameter and also
> accept "-p" additionally to "-P"  (cf. 
> <https://osdn.net/projects/tortoisesvn/scm/svn/commits/26348>).
>
> Therefore, my first question: Does Git still want to support very old
> versions of tortoiseplink or should I provide a patch which drops 
> support for it?

You sent the question to me so I am answering, but this depends on (1) who the users who use TortoisePlink are and (2) by dropping support for it, what we would gain.

I am guessing that nobody other than those on Windows use TortoisePlink, and that everybody other than those who build their own Git from source use Dscho's Git-for-Windows, and I further assume that the GfW comes with its own copy of OpenSSH.

So our intended audience is those who started using Git on Windows back when TortoisePlink was still a thing, are still happily using TortoisePlink, and are willing to only update Git but not migrate to OpenSSH. How big that audience is, I do not know, as I do not do Windows.

How much maintenance burden is the "support" costing us? A quick scan in connect.c tells me that the "add --batch to the command line" would be the only thing we would be able to shed; everything else seems to be shared with plink and putty.

So...?