Re: tortoiseplink ssh variant still needed?

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Junio,

On Sat, 23 Oct 2021, Junio C Hamano wrote:

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

Nobody really knows, but we started discouraging `plink` usage (also
`tortoiseplink` usage) already way back in the msysGit days. AFAIR we
simply ran into too much trouble, and started to only offer `plink` as an
option if the user had _any_ PuTTY saved sessions.

> 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.

Since I have to assume a very small usership, I would think that we can
drop support for the older `tortoiseplink`. But you're right, what does it
_buy_ us?

My guess is that Sven wants to go further and enable the `-o SetEnv` thing
for protocol v2 (which we figured out together, over in the Git for
Windows bug tracker, to be turned off when pushing). But that would
require the `tortoisegitplink` variant, I think.

So maybe a better idea would be to focus on introducing support for
`tortoisegitplink` and work on the `-o SetEnv` issue, and leave the
`--batch` code alone for now.

Ciao,
Dscho