obliterate functionality?

Martin Geisler mg at daimi.au.dk
Wed Mar 19 02:38:12 CDT 2008


"Paul Moore" <p.f.moore at gmail.com> writes:

> On 18/03/2008, Martin Geisler <mg at daimi.au.dk> wrote:
>> As others have told you, then this is not possible if other people have
>>  already pulled from the repository -- they now have their own copy of
>>  the data you want to delete, and there is nothing you can do to make
>>  them delete it!
>
> This thread has resulted in an awful lot of absolute statements.
> Things are not really so black and white.
>
> Of course it's possible to get people to delete copies of a
> repository. You just ask them.

Of course! That is easy to do with Mercurial too: you simply strip
away the offending changesets on all your clones and ask people to do
the same. Everytime you see someone with a clone that still has the
changesets, you ask him/her to strip them off. Send a mail with
something like this:

  Dear colleagues,

  I pushed revision REV by mistake. If you managed to pull it, please
  run 'hg strip REV' on your clones. Thank you.

That is the best you can do here.

> Certainly, they might refuse to, or simply ignore you. But the world
> isn't going to end because of this. And in general, people respect
> the wishes of the leaders of a project.

I was just trying to make it clear that you cannot *force* people to
delete the file and any obliterate command offered by Mercurial would
therefore never be 100% effective.

-- 
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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