obliterate functionality?

[Satish Balay]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Bruce M Simpson wrote:

> cowwoc wrote:
> >>     * You accidently checked in sensitive information and need it removed
> >>     * You are running a large codebase and need to archive old repository
> >> entries to clean up to save drivespace
> >>     * You need to split up a repository in several others for some reason,
> >> maybe a project needs to be split up
> >>     * You accidently checked in large chunks of (unused) information
> >> (perhaps some .iso was somehow included), which is sitting there bloating
> >> your repository for no good reason
> >>     
> >
> > I have personally run into many of these cases. They might be rare, but I
> > strongly advocate that Hg (and others) make it easier to obliterate files
> > from the repository so long as you have the necessary privileges.
> >   
> 
> The lack of obliterate functionality is a real barrier to the possible 
> future adoption of Mercurial by both XORP and the FreeBSD Project, two 
> projects where I wear hats, and have been trying to encourage the 
> adoption of Hg.
> 
> The same use cases mentioned above in this thread apply to both projects.
> 
> I disagree with the argument that "obliterate" is an unnecessary or 
> undesirable feature. The grounds given against "obliterate" are that it 
> is redundant, or difficult to fully implement in a distributed system, 
> or not relevant to such a system.

Bitkeeper has the command 'csetprune' for performing similar
operation. The net result is a repository without the pruned
changesets. However after the prune, the old clones cannot be used
with this newly creted repo.

Someone mentioned SVN feature "export and re-import" - which must be
similar to this one.

Sure - one cannot force all users to delete old clones, but they would
have to create new clones to collaborate. This feature helps with
bullets 2,3,4 above. And with bullet 1 - if the user set is limited,
the participents can *try* to convince the groupe to destroy all
clones. But thats a social issue - that mercurial shouldn't attempt to
fix.

Satish