Re: removing content from git history

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
To: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Michael Hendricks <michael@ndrix.org>,
	git@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: removing content from git history
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:49:33 -0500 (EST)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.0.82.0702211531060.31945@xanadu.home> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7vbqjnntut.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

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

> 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