On Wed, Jul 24, 2024 at 09:10:54AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Patrick Steinhardt [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I don't think that is a good idea. If we stop installing p4, the result
is that _nobody_ will ever run the tests at all. The tests, and by
extension git-p4 itself, would start to bitrot and we wouldn't notice
any kind of regressions at all anymore.

If we want to consider going down that route, I'd rather say we should
do it all or nothing: either we rip out git-p4 and the tests, or we
leave both of them in. I couldn't care less about git-p4 itself, so I
would not mind ripping it out altogether. But there may be users of this
script out there that do care, so I don't want to make that decision
unilaterally.

Yup, I was actually interpreting Dscho's message as advocating the
removal of "git p4".  Such a move would certainly force people who
do care about it to come out.  It is up to them to volunteer to help
maintaining "git p4".

This may be a good example to discuss "support policy" not on niche
platforms but on niche features (Emily Cc'ed).

As said, I wouldn't mind dropping support for `git p4` altogether. That
is a much bigger discussion though, and I'm not sure whether we should
just drop it at a "random" point in time without something like a grace
period where people can chime in and express their wish to help out with
the maintenance of it. In other words, we should probably deprecate it
properly and announce our intent to deprecate it. Both our release notes
and "Documentation/BreakingChanges.txt" could we viable ways to do that.

And while we haven't yet decided to rip out support for Perforce, I
think that the proposed patch series is somewhat sensible. I honestly
really only care about marking the patches as leak-free to help my
bigger goal of making the whole test suite leak-free. The other patches
that make the tests compatible with newer versions of Perforce aren't
all that important, but at least they help to make those tests a bit
more accessible to interested folks.

Patrick