(I'm the product manager for Git Systems at GitHub.)
(Although I'm not an active git/github user, so maybe there's an even more more obvious place a naive user having issues would go to figure out what their problem is. Hopefully there's a helpful commandline error explaining the situation.)
Does anyone know exactly when the brownout will end? I can't find this information anywhere.
E: Some old blog posts on other brownouts seem to suggest 1400 UTC. I still haven't found anything definitive for what's happening now.
- People who aren't using the old methods can turn them off now and leave them off, benefiting from the new security change sooner.
- People who need to fix something can temporarily repair their workflow at the time of their choosing.
- People who need more than 24 hours to fix their workflow can re-disable the old methods to test that they are now good, at a time of their leisure, between today and March.
Well, feature removals do. Deprecations are just declaring that a feature should not be used and either will or may be removed in the future, which causes no operational problems (and in fact is done specifically to help avoid the operational problems of feature removals.)
This was announced long ago. Though have to admit I didn’t see it back then myself.
Because the next brownout is permanent - and that will be an even bigger PITA.
I think it's extraordinarily powerful to have these brownouts for organizations that don't make the change when they should have (which was last year).
The point of the brown out is to help people find cases where they’ve missed this. So “opt out by doing it beforehand” isn’t a viable solution.
The last brownout was a quarter ago. A lot of new things can get introduced in that time that still do it wrong.
Seems like very short-sighted thinking.
The idea is to make brownouts increasingly painful - just letting them be a short period of time, or let people "Opt. Out" doesn't service the purpose here - which is to make it absolutely clear that the service is going away.
more like a blackout.
Brownouts need to be a PITA otherwise people are too likely to miss them or write them off as transient errors.
> I imagine it would be much more technical effort, but a way for us to opt certain repos out of a brownout would be really nice
That's not a bad idea, though.
In this context it's referring to a transitory period where a feature is in a state of flux and may only partially work.
Comes from terminology used for the electric grid, where a brownout is a milder form of a blackout. Instead of electricity being entirely shut off and everything goes "black," the voltage drops and lights dim, i.e. go "brown."
Other than the blog post that doesn't appear in the changelog RSS, how were we supposed to be made aware of this breaking change?