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, 2 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/urls.txt b/Documentation/urls.txt
index 9ccb24677e..b05da95788 100644
--- a/Documentation/urls.txt
+++ b/Documentation/urls.txt
@@ -7,9 +7,8 @@ Depending on the transport protocol, some of this information may be
 absent.
 
 Git supports ssh, git, http, and https protocols (in addition, ftp,
-and ftps can be used for fetching and rsync can be used for fetching
-and pushing, but these are inefficient and deprecated; do not use
-them).
+and ftps can be used for fetching, but this is inefficient and
+deprecated; do not use it).
 
 The native transport (i.e. git:// URL) does no authentication and
 should be used with caution on unsecured networks.
@@ -20,7 +19,6 @@ The following syntaxes may be used with them:
 - git://host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
 - http{startsb}s{endsb}://host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
 - ftp{startsb}s{endsb}://host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
-- rsync://host.xz/path/to/repo.git/
 
 An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh protocol: