I believe there was agreement to continue to provide svn updates through the life of 12.x.There's no way to keep mergemaster(8) working, it relies on source tags GIT just won't generate.
Exactly. Some people have known about this for a minimum of 3.5 years (assuming the PR meant 10.4). Expecting users to read every bug report to find which happen to mention changes that break existing procedures isn't reasonable. This reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote.Also note PR 252417 starts like this:
I specifically checked the official master FreeBSD copy of the Handbook from: https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/en/books/handbook/book.pdf (no hotlink title so the URL is visible in the post). Word search in Acrobat: etcupdate, 0 matches; mergemaster, 25 matches.So, there probably was a deprecation notice. Maybe many didn't read it. Also, the handbook used etcupdate(8) for a while, but there's been this ongoing problem of finding an old and outdated version of the handbook with Google…
I always do read the release notes and errata, and I don't remember seeing it. That doesn't mean there never was one, of course. Even if there was, this is the sort of thing that should remain in the release notes until the change happens (and then the release notes should say that as of the version the release notes pertain to, things have changed).