a simple recipe to 'obliterate' an item from svn repository

Hello

I need to delete a file permanently from my repository, since it was
added by mistake and is very big. I understand this is not a very easy
thing to do, and is related to the project of an 'svn obliterate'
command.

I seem to have found a simple workaround for my problem, and I would
very much like to share it for comments.

Suppose the current revision is 200 and the big file was added in rev
100. I can use the dump / load scheme of svnadmin, taking care in
skipping revision 100 during the process:

svnadmin dump -r1:99 oldrepos > rev.1-99
svnadmin dump -r101:200 --incremental oldrepos > rev.101-200

svnadmin create newrepos
svnadmin load newrepos < rev.1-99
svnadmin load newrepos < rev.101-200

I only wonder if the "--incremental" option will work even when
merging non-contiguous revisions. Please note that in revision 100
only the big unwanted file was added.

Thank you for your help

-- GFS
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 Dr. Giorgio F. SIGNORINI, PhD
 Dipartimento di Chimica tel: +39-055-457-3085
 Universita` di Firenze
 via della Lastruccia, 3 email: giorgio.signorini "at" unifi.it
 I-50019 Sesto F. (Firenze) Italy http://www.chim.unifi.it/~signo
   My PGP key: http://srv.chim.unifi.it/~signo/signo.asc
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Received on 2012-03-16 19:41:02 CET