Mutating history in Subversion and Bazaar

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 15:12 +0200, David Allouche wrote:
> Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > Yes, though only if that hook script allows editing the svn:date
> > revprop. I'm not sure whether that should be considered a problem
> > though. If somebody would edit a Bazaar revision without changing the
> > revision id, that can corrupt the distributed database as well.
> The important question, which I do not think has been answered yet, is:
> "What kind of history destroying changes people usually do on SVN
> repositories?" Only after answering that question can we have a useful
> discussion on how to catch them.
The only two use cases I'm aware of and have ever seen are:

 * Fixing typos in the commit message. The Subversion folks use this a
lot. This can be done remotely.
 * Removing revisions that added confidential data to the repository
(passwords, credit card numbers, etc). This requires taking the
repository offline.

I haven't ever seen other cases but I'll see if I can find some more
information and ask some of the other svn developers.

> Bzr needs to cope better with referential integrity violations anyway,
> if only because that's a common problem to all reproducible import
> systems. So we can accept only preserving integrity for common history
> alterations. However dealing with integrity violations is always going
> be troublesome to users, and we should prevent them as much as
> reasonably possible.
This is a good point - we should probably keep these discussions
separate imho.

Cheers,

Jelmer
-- 
Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at samba.org> - http://samba.org/~jelmer/
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