bzr remove "bin" here and now (and before now) whatever that means!

Joshua Judson Rosen jrosen at harvestai.com
Mon Nov 4 15:34:18 UTC 2013


On 2013-11-04 09:24, Lucio Crusca wrote:
>
> I need to remove the "bin" directory from bzr because
> it got there by mistake... and it got also committed in a few releases by
> mistake...
> Now that I realized it, I've already removed it with "bzr remove" and ignored
> it with "bzr ignore", but that all has an effect starting from now only...
>
> can I «bzr remove "bin" from previous commits also»? If yes, how?

`Yes and no'. Typically there are a bunch of considerations that make
it impractical or otherwise push the answer toward "no"....

You can in fact go back and re-create the history of your branch with differences:
you `just' branch off at the point just before the bad change happened, recreate 
that
commit without the bad part, and then replay all of the later changes as
new commits on top of your new branch (though, if any of those commits are *merges*,
then you need to be careful about recreating the merges during replay).

But, even when the problem of revising a history is _technically_ straightforward,
the trouble is that, if there are any other branches with the `bad version of 
history'
in existence, you have to go find them and ensure that everyone using them throws
them away and uses histories based on your new branch instead. It's `mostly the same
changes in the same order', but it's a different timeline (ever watch any 
time-travel
movies, like `Back to the Future'?).

And, if you've used any tags in the `bad timeline', then you need to get everyone
to delete your old tags so that they don't run into tag-conflicts after you move
your tags.

So: yes you can rewrite your own view of history, but doing that after you've
published it--after others have started relying on it--is generally poor form.

Revisionist history can be a hard thing to perpetrate, but it's sometimes
workable if you have a very small number of people involved in the project and you
can get them all into the same room together for a history-revising session.

-- 
"'tis an ill wind that blows no minds."



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