Re: removing content from git history

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Feb 21, 2007, 19:33 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.0.82.0702211414410.31945@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <7vy7mrnxlo.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 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.

Either you care about published data or you don't.

If you do then you are screwed anyway irrespective of any missing object support we might implement. There will always be someone somewhere with the real thing, and we all know how faster forbidden material does travel on the Internet.

If you don't then it is just better to rewrite history and have a clean and unambiguous repository. And because you don't care about existing copies you shouldn't bother with the fact that the rewritten repo is not compatible with the previously published one.

Sure rewriting history is a potentially expensive operation depending on the size and nature of the change, but it is done only once. And actually it can't be _that_ much expensive than a git-repack -a -f.

I think it is much better to provide a tool to properly rewrite history than adding support for missing objects and be stuck with them forever.

Nicolas