obliterate functionality?

[Martin Geisler]

Bruce M Simpson <bms at incunabulum.net> writes:

> The lack of obliterate functionality is a real barrier to the possible
> future adoption of Mercurial by both XORP and the FreeBSD Project, two
> projects where I wear hats, and have been trying to encourage the
> adoption of Hg.
>
> The same use cases mentioned above in this thread apply to both projects.
>
> I disagree with the argument that "obliterate" is an unnecessary or
> undesirable feature. The grounds given against "obliterate" are that
> it is redundant, or difficult to fully implement in a distributed
> system, or not relevant to such a system.

It is not just difficult to remove a piece of data form a distributed
system, it is really *impossible*. If people have gotten hold of your
data you have no way to force them to delete it. The data might be on an
unplugged USB device, etc...

> My grounds for advocating "obliterate" in view of those points, are
> that in the situations outlined above, people can and do make
> mistakes, and even if "obliterate" is not guaranteed to purge all
> copies of a "leaked" or otherwise mistakenly committed revision, the
> accountability is there and you can say you tried to obliterate the
> file, regardless of the downstream change-set penalties or the fact
> that someone now has a copy of the file (the "dog ate my homework"
> argument).

It sounds like you want the backout command:

    hg backout [OPTION]... [-r] REV

    reverse effect of earlier changeset

        Commit the backed out changes as a new changeset. The new
        changeset is a child of the backed out changeset.

It lets you mark a change as a "mistake" by committing a counter-change
which, when people pull it, will reverse the mistake.

The original mistake and the correction are of course still present in
the repository, people can look at them with 'hg view', etc., but people
who pull from the repository will not be affected by the change anymore
since you have corrected it.

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multi-Party Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
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