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From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
To: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>, Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch>
Cc: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>,
        Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        <stable@vger.kernel.org>, <git@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-am: error out when seeing -b/--binary
In-Reply-To: <87fwdcldqj.fsf@thomas.inf.ethz.ch> (Thomas Rast's message of
 "Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:31:00 +0100")
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Thomas Rast <trast@student.ethz.ch> writes:

> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> 	--binary)
>> 		: ;;
>> 	-b)
>> 		gettextln >&2 "The -b option (a no-op short for --binary) was removed in 1.7.10."
>> 		die "$(gettext "Please adjust your scripts.")"
>> 		;;
>>
>> Mentioning deprecation in 1.6.0 in the message left me uneasy because
>> we never actually did anything to actively deprecate the option; it
>> just has not been needed since 1.4.3 and we stopped advertising it in
>> the manpage in 1.6.0.  So I don't like the implication of "this is all
>> right because we told you so" --- on the contrary, it is "in practice
>> nobody seems to be using this option and we hope nobody will notice
>> when we take it away".
>
> Hmm, I had an alternate patch ready in the morning, but Junio beat us to
> it and applied the old one to master.

I really don't think it is a good idea to avoid mentioning 1.6.0, at
which we *removed* description of the option in our manual pages and
from the "git am -h" help message. How much more active deprecation
would a user want?

To put it another way, think what your answer would be when somebody
sees the message and says "eh? all of a sudden it was removed?".
Wouldn't you tell him "At 1.6.0 we deprecated it and stopped
advertising it"?  Why not give that answer upfront?

Especially when you think "in practice nobody seems to be using
this" is true?