Re: removing content from git history

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Feb 21, 2007, 18:47 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702211041500.4043@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070221183028.GA9088@ginosko.local>

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Michael Hendricks wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> What's a decent way to make a branch into a new repository?  My first
> inclination is to "cp -a" the existing repository, checkout the branch,
> delete all other branches and repack.  That seems to have worked in my
> quick test, but is there a better way?

That works.

As does just "clone repo, delete all unwanted branches, and prune" (of course, if you don't want the old repo, you can skip the "clone" part, and just do the "delete all unwanted branches and prune" thing).

In some ways, a more straightforward approach may be to just create a new repo, and populate it with just one branch (I say "more straightforward", not "easier", because I just think it's conceptually simpler):

	mkdir new-repo
	cd new-repo
	git init
	git pull old-repo <branch>

(add "--bare" and "--shared" to taste - with bare repos yu can also do it the other way by doing a push into it from outside after you've created it, which can be the "logical" way to do it if you want to just publish the end result on some shared site)

		Linus