Sensitive file removal

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-01-17 20:18, Steve Borho <steve at ageia.com> wrote:
>On Wednesday 17 January 2007 20:11, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> A more likely case would be:
>>
>>   A lawyer contacts you and asks that you *remove* all traces of source
>>   file `bin/utility/utility.c', because they are `tainted' by code from
>>   Foo, Inc.  They know that some people have pulled copies from you, but
>>   they don't care.  All they want is that *you* don't continue the
>>   distribution of the tainted sources.
>>
>> Now add to the mix the interesting possibility that the lawyer doesn't
>> contact you when the changeset is still 'tip', but several months later.
>>
>> How would you approach this sort of `repo-history surgery'?
>
> I'm more of a pragmatist.  If I was in this situation I would just
> start an entirely new repository and quit hosting the tainted one
> publically.

That's the idea. But the hg-to-hg conversion script mentioned below,
would be very nice to have as a supported extension or command.  I'm not
sure how the current manifests work in detail.

Perhaps, it would be nice if we could provide a file like .hgignore to
`hg clone', which would 'strip off' files from the manifest of
changesets "on the fly", as they are being cloned.  Maybe this is not so
easy, and I'm being silly.  I don't really know :)