obliterate functionality?

[Marcin Kasperski]

> It's much more than an assumption in Mercurial's case. Mercurial is a
> distributed system and thus, obliteration is generally not possible even
> in theory. Think of Mercurial like a newspaper: if you publish the
> Pentagon Papers one morning, you cannot simply quietly retract them the
> next. At that point, it's no longer a technical issue.

Depends. In quite a few cases you have control over the
repositories. So it may as well be requesting all 2 recipients of the
memo to shred or return it.

And even in case of public project it may be in many cases satisfactory
if obliterated file is not obtained by future clones/pulls (especially
if it is a case of large file polluting the repo). Those who already
got it, can obliterate it by theirselves...

PS I happened to run myself into "unnecessary huge file in repo"
problem.  Solved it by bare a) create new repo b) copy newest version
there c) use this as starting point for forks and d) archive old repo
so one can take a look if old history is needed. Not the best
solution, I bet...


-- 
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| Marcin Kasperski   |   Most of the bad things that can happen to
| http://mekk.waw.pl | a project are the result of miscommunication.
|                    |                    (Booch)
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