Re: how to move with history?

["J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 09:29:18PM +0100, Oliver Kullmann wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 18, 2007 at 09:49:07PM +0200, Alex Riesen wrote:
> > Git does not keep "renaming history". It does not have to, as it keeps
> > how your project looked at each commit (point in history).
> 
> For my purposes, that is a bad thing, since I want to get rid off some parts
> of the history (specifically I want to eliminate some files from history),
> as explained in that last paragraph in my e-mail (with the motivation):

Oh, so even if somebody checks out a previous version of the project,
you don't want them to see that file at the old name any more?

The git history is totally immutable, by design--the SHA1 name of a
commit is taken over the commit, the contents of the entire tree at that
point, and any commit(s) that precede this commit--hence it recursively
summarizes the entire history of the project.

So if you want to erase all memory of a path from the git history, then
you have to rebuild it all.  Which is possible--it'd just mean creating
a new project and writing a script to import every version into the new
project....

--b.