transport: drop support for git-over-rsync

The git-over-rsync protocol is inefficient and broken, and
has been for a long time. It transfers way more objects than
it needs (grabbing all of the remote's "objects/",
regardless of which objects we need). It does its own ad-hoc
parsing of loose and packed refs from the remote, but
doesn't properly override packed refs with loose ones,
leading to garbage results (e.g., expecting the other side
to have an object pointed to by a stale packed-refs entry,
or complaining that the other side has two copies of the
refs[1]).

This latter breakage means that nobody could have
successfully pulled from a moderately active repository
since cd547b4 (fetch/push: readd rsync support, 2007-10-01).

We never made an official deprecation notice in the release
notes for git's rsync protocol, but the tutorial has marked
it as such since 914328a (Update tutorial., 2005-08-30).
And on the mailing list as far back as Oct 2005, we can find
Junio mentioning it as having "been deprecated for quite
some time."[2,3,4]. So it was old news then; cogito had
deprecated the transport in July of 2005[5] (though it did
come back briefly when Linus broke git-http-pull!).

Of course some people professed their love of rsync through
2006, but Linus clarified in his usual gentle manner[6]:

  > Thanks!  This is why I still use rsync, even though
  > everybody and their mother tells me "Linus says rsync is
  > deprecated."

  No. You're using rsync because you're actively doing
  something _wrong_.

The deprecation sentiment was reinforced in 2008, with a
mention that cloning via rsync is broken (with no fix)[7].

Even the commit porting rsync over to C from shell (cd547b4)
lists it as deprecated! So between the 10 years of informal
warnings, and the fact that it has been severely broken
since 2007, it's probably safe to simply remove it without
further deprecation warnings.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/285101
[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/10093
[3] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/17734
[4] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/18911
[5] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/5617
[6] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/19354
[7] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/103635

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 36 deletions

diff --git a/t/t5510-fetch.sh b/t/t5510-fetch.sh
index 0ba9db0..c383878 100755
--- a/t/t5510-fetch.sh
+++ b/t/t5510-fetch.sh
@@ -314,42 +314,6 @@ test_expect_success 'bundle should be able to create a full history' '
 
 '
 
-! rsync --help > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &&
-say 'Skipping rsync tests because rsync was not found' || {
-test_expect_success 'fetch via rsync' '
-	git pack-refs &&
-	mkdir rsynced &&
-	(cd rsynced &&
-	 git init --bare &&
-	 git fetch "rsync:../.git" master:refs/heads/master &&
-	 git gc --prune &&
-	 test $(git rev-parse master) = $(cd .. && git rev-parse master) &&
-	 git fsck --full)
-'
-
-test_expect_success 'push via rsync' '
-	mkdir rsynced2 &&
-	(cd rsynced2 &&
-	 git init) &&
-	(cd rsynced &&
-	 git push "rsync:../rsynced2/.git" master) &&
-	(cd rsynced2 &&
-	 git gc --prune &&
-	 test $(git rev-parse master) = $(cd .. && git rev-parse master) &&
-	 git fsck --full)
-'
-
-test_expect_success 'push via rsync' '
-	mkdir rsynced3 &&
-	(cd rsynced3 &&
-	 git init) &&
-	git push --all "rsync:rsynced3/.git" &&
-	(cd rsynced3 &&
-	 test $(git rev-parse master) = $(cd .. && git rev-parse master) &&
-	 git fsck --full)
-'
-}
-
 test_expect_success 'fetch with a non-applying branch.<name>.merge' '
 	git config branch.master.remote yeti &&
 	git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/bigfoot &&