On 5/23/05, Branko Èibej <brane@xbc.nu> wrote:> IMHO, ClearCase's "rmelem" command is the horriblest thing in existence,> preciesly because it removes _all_ history associated with an element.> So if you do that, you've got a good chance of destroying historical> configurations. "rmversion" has similar problems, but to a lesser extent.
We never allowed users to use "rmelem" because of what you stated. Itis a very evil and dangerous command and the first thing we did in anyproject was to write a trigger to deactivate it. In theory, any userwho created an element has a right to use "rmelem" on it -- even ifother users have made changes on that element. A user could "rmelem"any element they created no matter how old it is, whether it iscurrently used or not, etc.
That said, I probably used rmelem on my repository about once permonth when a user accidentally added something that they shouldn't.
Even then, we could have simply left the extraneous element there andsimply remove references to that element from the directory. However,there has been a couple of times when someone added a file thatcontained proprietary information that should not be archived. Inthese cases, we had to scrub that file from the archive.
The "rmversion" command was used to remove binary versions of filesthat were no longer needed. Many places store their build resultsinside of ClearCase. For example, a company might store the binariesthat are shipped to QA or the version of a library that everyoneshould be using for their testing. Once these versions are no longerneeded, they are scrubbed from the archive to save room.
> That said, there have been many requests for something we like to call> "svn obliterate" which would be close to ClearCase's "rmelem". People> seem to be mostly concerned about limiting database storage> requirements, and that's a valid concern.
On the user list, I mentioned that there are really two forms of"obliterate": One removes a particular version of a file (likeClearCase's "rmversion") and one that removes the entire history of afile (like ClearCase's "rmelem"). I consider the former to be moreused than the latter.
The problem I see is that Subversion doesn't version a particularfile, but the entire archive. Because of this, I imagine it would berather difficult to implement such commands.
--David Weintraubqazwart@gmail.com
Received on Tue May 24 18:52:34 2005