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0 pointschaorace5y ago0 comments

On that note, does git as a protocol even have a clean mechanism for redacting history like this? If someone were to press this to the logical extreme, how could a developer most cleanly excise violating history from a repo using current tooling?

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bearjaws5y ago

There is a way, its not very clean, git filter-branch and you will have to force push all branches, which is fun with large teams.

Unfortunately in larger repos with long histories its extremely slow, and uses a lot of IO. I used it previously to clean up large binaries that were included early on in a repo's history, making it take up way more space than needed.

jkingsman5y ago

When you need to do it in a big repo, BFG Repo-Cleaner is usually the way to go: https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/

CivBase5y ago

I assume you would have to revert to the parent of the offending commit, cherry-pick the non-offending code, commit, then rebase the entire master branch on that new commit.

Then you'd have to repeat the process for all forks and branches. It'd be a huge pain, but I think it's doable.

I've never tried something like this, though, so there might be some complications.

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