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Re: Best way to "un-version control" a file?

From: Tony Butt <tony.butt_at_cea.com.au>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:16:36 +1000

On Fri, 2010-09-24 at 02:26 -0500, David Huang wrote:
>
> On Sep 24, 2010, at 12:17 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Daniel Shahaf <d.s_at_daniel.shahaf.name> wrote:
> >> Les Mikesell wrote on Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 12:27:40 -0500:
> >>> Am I wrong in thinking that similar accidents happen to everyone
> >>> eventually and that a feature to fix them would be desirable?
> >>
> >> Yes, the feature has its use case. And if you'd like to see it
> >> implemented yesterday, that's cool. Just don't assume that everyone
> >> thinks the same way please.
> >
> > Can you actually name anyone who thinks it's not a useful, or
> > potentially useful feature? Anyone?
>
> I suspect what was meant is that not everyone thinks obliterate needs to be "implemented yesterday" or that it's the "#1 request". I do think obliterate would be useful, but I personally have not ever needed it in my 2 or 3 years of administering an SVN repo, and don't forsee needing it in the future.
>
Im about 6 years of managing a repository for a development team, we
have only really needed it once. On that occasion we were able to take
the repository down, dump it out, strip out the undesirable file, and
reload. Our repository has grown somewhat in size since then, and
certainly the dumpfile will be much larger (since time is a dimension
there), so it would be that much more painful to do if we had to.

There have probably been a handful of times when we would have liked to
obliterate some files, chiefly large binaries which were inadvertently
committed (against our usage policy), but it is not worth the fuss to
dump and reload to do this.

The number of times we might have obliterated by mistake, and had to
recover in some way - none. If obliterate becomes available, we would
want to be very very very careful in it's usage.
> Also, it's not like the SVN team has rejected the feature; the FAQ mentions that it's planned: http://subversion.apache.org/faq.html#removal and there's even a roadmap for it: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf//subversion/trunk/notes/obliterate/plan-milestones.html

-- 
Tony Butt <tony.butt_at_cea.com.au>
CEA Technologies
Canberra, Australia
Received on 2010-09-28 04:17:47 CEST

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