Re: removing content from git history

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Feb 21, 2007, 20:49 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.0.82.0702211531060.31945@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <7vbqjnntut.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

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

Show 9 quoted lines

> 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.

It might help, or it might create a management nightmare. It would be really easy to accidentally push the real objects out since a repo with them would be indistinguishable from a repo with stubs (that's the point of stub objects isn't it?), and because of the distributed nature of GIT the leak could come from anyone with access to the private objects.

In such a scenario I think it is still more sensible to rewrite the repo history before going open source. You need only to worry about isolating the proprietary stuff once.

Nicolas