Hiding old data from new users

[Augie Fackler]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 10:08:27AM -0400, Bob Eby wrote:
> Hi Mercurial experts,
>
> This may sound strange but we've checked a secret into one of our
> repositories and now we want to share pretty much everything but that
> with an outside consultant.
>
> I tried creating a partial repo of a "cleaned" branch with:
>
> hg clone -b
>
> Problem is, this included all the parents which pulled in the old
> default branch that had the secret.
>
> Aside from copying a current checked out file set into a brand
> spanking new repository, is there a way to create a partial repository
> suitable for intermediate push/pull upstream from client repositories
> that can act as a "secrecy buffer" against some old default file?
>
> I'd like to give them some but not all of the repo history, or does it
> not even make sense to want to share that extra history?

This isn't something we can currently do. Right now, your options (as
far as I can remember) are:

1) Use 'hg convert' to make a sanitized version of the repository
history. This will change all the revision identifiers and make
exchanging revisions between the repositories hard or impossible.

2) Wait for something like narrowhg or sparse to finalize and use
that. I can't say that I'd recommend either of them now, as they're
still fairly immature and probably don't let you do the kind of ACL
enforcement you likely need.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. :/

>
> Thanks for any and all input,
> Robert Eby
> _______________________________________________
> Mercurial mailing list
> Mercurial at mercurial-scm.org
> https://www.mercurial-scm.org/mailman/listinfo/mercurial