Re: removing content from git history

[Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>]

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:

> On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
>
>> While I agree in principle to the argument that there is no
>> taking it back what's already published, I've heard people
>> wanting to just stop distributing further, without worrying
>> about copies already out there.  'missing objects' support would
>> help us in such a situation.
>
> I still think this is a "put your head in the sand and pretend that some 
> sensitive data never existed in the wild" attitude.  And I really don't 
> see the point of supporting that illusion in GIT with technical means.

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.  The
development team can keep going forward, internally using the
real objects, while pushing stub objects out to the public
repository, without having to rewrite the history and re-partition
the project.

But after having thought about that, I think it would not buy us
much.  You would want to re-partition the project sooner or
later in such a situation *anyway*, so our time is better spent
on giving better support to split existing projects.  It may
already be sufficient in the form of admin-rewritehist, in which
case we can worry about other things ;-).