removing commited file permanently

[Colin D Bennett]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:55:53 +0900
David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:

> Colin D Bennett wrote:
> >
> > I know you could use the bzr-rebase plugin to rebuild your
> > repository, excluding the revision that added that file, but this
> > is *extremely* undesirable in most cases.
> 
> Why ? Specifically, in this case, I don't see any way around it: you
> remove a file, it is a desirable feature that every revision is
> changed, no ?

Well, since rebasing will produce a completely new branch with new
revisions, any related branches (most importantly ones shared with other
people) will no longer be related.  Now, I haven't used rebase myself,
so it might be the case that rebase produces identical revisions in the
new tree for the revisions prior to the one you are deleting.  In that
case, it *would* be the same effect as an 'uncommit' + re-commit.

> > You could use the 'uncommit' command to uncommit only the revision
> > that added that file and all later revisions, then (if you committed
> > revisions after that one) you would have to re-commit those
> > revisions, but they would become "new" revisions and this would
> > cause problems if you've merged those changes to other branches.
> 
> Which has exactly the same drawback than rebase without the
> advantage, no ?

Well, my thought was that in the case of uncommit, at least the
revisions prior to the deleted one would be intact, but rebase would
not preserve the revision IDs, etc.

I may be wrong on rebase; maybe it is the best solution.  Also, was at
first thinking that it might have been a quick "oops, I committed a
huge file" problem, but then I recalled that Alex said "some time
ago".  That makes uncommit+recommit less attractive, and makes rebase
the only practical option.

Regards,
Colin
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