On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 11:00:17AM -0400, Jeff King wrote: > The code in vcs-svn was started in 2010 as an attempt to build a > remote-helper for interacting with svn repositories (as opposed to > git-svn). However, we never got as far as shipping a mature remote > helper, and the last substantive commit was e99d012a6bc in 2012. > > We do have a git-remote-testsvn, and it is even installed as part of > "make install". But given the name, it seems unlikely to be used by > anybody (you'd have to explicitly "git clone testsvn::$url", and there > have been zero mentions of that on the mailing list since 2013, and even > that includes the phrase "you might need to hack a bit to get it working > properly"[1]). > > We also ship contrib/svn-fe, which builds on the vcs-svn work. However, > it does not seem to build out of the box for me, as the link step misses > some required libraries for using libgit.a. Curiously, the original > build breakage bisects for me to eff80a9fd9 (Allow custom "comment > char", 2013-01-16), which seems unrelated. There was an attempt to fix > it in da011cb0e7 (contrib/svn-fe: fix Makefile, 2014-08-28), but on my > system that only switches the error message. > > So it seems like the result is not really usable by anybody in practice. > It would be wonderful if somebody wanted to pick up the topic again, and > potentially it's worth carrying around for that reason. But the flip > side is that people doing tree-wide operations have to deal with this > code. And you can see the list with (replace "HEAD" with this commit as > appropriate): I have nothing to add to this email other than to say that I think it makes sense to remove this. I agree it would be nice if somebody picked it up, but given that nothing has really changed since ~8 years ago, I think that it's unlikely to happen in the next ~8 years ;). At least, it seems unlikely enough that dropping 2MB from the installation size is worth it. If someone *is* interested in picking it up, I'm sure that they won't have trouble finding this patch and reverting it. Thanks. > [snip] Thanks, Taylor
