obliterate functionality?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2008-03-18 19:01, Martin Marques <martin at marquesminen.com.ar> wrote:
> Bruce M Simpson escribi??:
> > 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.
> 
> Exacly which one of the cases mentioned? Why can't FreeBSD use a VCS 
> that doesn't obliterate? BTW, what DO they use now a days?

The two use cases which I am aware of are:

  * You accidently checked in sensitive information and need it
    removed.
  * You accidentally checked in large chunks of (unused) information
    (perhaps some .iso was somehow included), which is sitting there
    bloating your repository for no good reason.

FreeBSD can't use a VCS which does not have any sort of obliterate
support because these two use cases have occured already in the past,
and we are pretty confident they will happen again.  We are humans,
after all, and fallible beings at that :)

The two major VCS systems used today in FreeBSD work are CVS and
Perforce.  CVS doesn't really have `obliterate support', but with a bit
of manual repo-surgery things can look "as if" it had.  Perforce has a
special command to obliterate files.