Re: removing content from git history

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Feb 21, 2007, 20:22 UTC
Message-ID: <7vbqjnntut.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LRH.0.82.0702211414410.31945@xanadu.home>

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:

Show 11 quoted lines

> On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> While I agree in principle to the argument that there is no
>> taking it back what's already published, I've heard people
>> wanting to just stop distributing further, without worrying
>> about copies already out there.  'missing objects' support would
>> help us in such a situation.
>
> I still think this is a "put your head in the sand and pretend that some 
> sensitive data never existed in the wild" attitude.  And I really don't 
> see the point of supporting that illusion in GIT with technical means.

Well, I think we are in agreement (and that is why I said "I've heard people wanting").

But it is entirely possible that somebody has a project that is internal to a company managed for a long time with git, that he wants to go open source, with (almost) full history. And the project may have some proprietary add-on bit which cannot be published, while building the public bits does not require that part. Stubbing things out may help that kind of situation. The development team can keep going forward, internally using the real objects, while pushing stub objects out to the public repository, without having to rewrite the history and re-partition the project.

But after having thought about that, I think it would not buy us much. You would want to re-partition the project sooner or later in such a situation *anyway*, so our time is better spent on giving better support to split existing projects. It may already be sufficient in the form of admin-rewritehist, in which case we can worry about other things ;-).