Elliotte Rusty Harold gets it wrong

Elliotte Rusty Harold of IBM writes a pretty good introduction to Subversion

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-subversion/index.html

However, on one critical point, I believe he get's it wrong and creates FUD
around the Subversion project: He points to the Apache project as an example
of how the lack of a 'obliterate' function has held them in a liable position
because they can't delete files.

I've tried to point out a correction by sending the following text some time
ago, but I got no response.

You're mistaken about SVN missing the feature to permanently delete
("obliterate") repository contents. It's just that it is not a user function.
Rather, it is an administrator function -- available since version 1 at
least. The repository administrator would use svndumpfilter to take a
repository and filter out the bad commit(s) and pipe that into a new
repository. You don't want to do this all the time because it takes skill and
effort, but it's supposed to be a low occurence event. The absence of a
user-level 'obliterate' function is considered a feature, not a bug by the
svn developers.

Perhaps somebody in the project or on this list can try to get the story
emmended.

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Received on Tue Oct 9 19:00:05 2007