Obsolete parameter 'ignoreTychoRepositories'

[kriegaex]

In an OSS project, I found a configuration for plugin org.eclipse.tycho:target-platform-configuration:2.7.0 with this config element:

<ignoreTychoRepositories>true</ignoreTychoRepositories>

My IDE flagged the parameter as illegal, which is true. That parameter does not exist in version 2.7.0. Now I wanted to find out if it used to exist in older plugin versions, and if so, until which version. Except for being a curious person, I also want to understand even obsolete things, before I decide to either remove them for good or replace them with something functionally equivalent. So I tried to look for older plugin documentation versions, even using Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, on GitHub I can only search the main branch of a repository. There is not way to search other branches or historic versions. There also was not commit comment mentioning the property. But I did find to my utter surprise 3 integration tests still using the obsolete parameter to this date.

So I did what I wanted to avoid: I cloned Tycho and called

$ git log -SignoreTychoRepositories --oneline

c0b8f851f moved tycho demo projects to a separate repository
593a2467b Updated to use equinox, jdt and p2 3.7rc4
513805065 CQ5150 Initial check-in of tycho sources

I quickly found out that in 593a246 (part of Tycho 0.14.0), the plugin option was removed. Because the option was always undocumented, I am still not sure what it used to do, even though the commit comment gave me a hint, so I can make an educated guess. But normally not being a Tycho or even Eclipse user, I just have a vague idea. But that is better than none.

Questions:

1. Can somebody enlighten me more about this very ancient feature which was removed 11 years ago? What exactly did it do? Is there anything else to replace it functionally?
2. Could I have found out more easily, e.g. by browsing an archive of older Maven sites for this plugin?
3. Would somebody please clean up the integration tests?