Re: removing stuff from repository, permanently

Alexander Sabourenkov <screwdriver@lxnt.info> writes:

> By dumping in carefully selected ranges of revisions and loading
> those dumps excluding even more carefully selected paths it would be
> possible to get rid of any undesired information.
>
> Is this worth doing?

Speaking as a guy who has actually edited a dumpfile to prune out all
paths at or under some directory I no longer wanted, I'd say, "Sure,
it's worth doing." This would provide a really easy way to do a
repository splice. Using our current repository as an example:

   $ svnadmin dump old-svn > dumpfile
   $ svnadmin load --excludes="/clients" svn < dumpfile
   $ svnadmin load --includes="/clients" svn-clients < dumpfile

Default action for revisions in which no nodes changed (as a result of
the filtering) would be to simply create an empty revision (so that
numbering is preserved). You'd probably also want a --drop-empty-revs
option which would cause the loader to not bother creating new
revisions where all the changes were filtered out.

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Received on Thu Mar 6 16:28:43 2003