Comments on: Subversion Obliterate, the forgotten feature

By: Benny Bottema

Benny Bottema — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:57:43 +0000

This is excellent news indeed, thank you for the heads up!

By: James Bailey

James Bailey — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:51:52 +0000

Hi,

Just a very quick note to say that developement for Obliterate is ongoing and is going well.

Julian Foad blogged about his progress here:

http://subversion.wandisco.com/component/content/article/1/36.html

He’s also been updating our wiki here:

http://subversion.wandisco.com/wiki/index.php/Obliterate

Cheers,
James Bailey

By: randomdude

randomdude — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:24:36 +0000

That was sheer nonsense.

By: Jon S

Jon S — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:35:06 +0000

I need this feature right now. When can it be ready? And no I won’t use the 75% chance of success batch process.

Creativity instead of moaning might do the trick. The number one use case (for me) is the need to remove weighty old content – not old source. I like old source code. No need to DELETE a revision POINTER – Modify revision tree with 0 length files and flag it, allowing UI’s downstream to filter or note the change. This is software, right? Once obliterate is in, system admins should be able to disable it if their auditing requirements call for such. It isn’t like, even without the feature, people are prevented from bypassing auditing requirements by deleting the entire repository. Sorry for all the obfuscatory double negatives in the last sentence, just wanted to blend in with the thread.

By: randomdude

randomdude — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:59:58 +0000

As an open source developer, I think it’s ridiculous when someone uses errr… abuses the term “open source” to absolve responsibility.

If you’re lucky enough to have a community and they are pretty unanimously requesting a feature, there’s no excuse not to implement it OTHER THAN that the code is too big of a mess. Fine, rewrite it. Don’t just say “Hey, it’s open source. Why don’t you download it and add the feature.” That’s just ridiculous.

I’m also wondering why the SVN folks decided not to implement this from the beginning. I mean, who would decide *not* to implement a feature like this? One has to wonder if it was just a huge, gigantic, mother of all “woops”.

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:49:41 +0000

Thanks for posting this. I’m really surprised that no one has wrapped the dump/dumpfilter/load command as a little batch file and called it obliterate. The procedure seems to work 80-90% of the time and could be fixed to work all of the time.

I don’t see why the workaround couldn’t become the sanctioned way to do this.

By: Liza

Liza — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:14:34 +0000

Not that I’m impressed a lot, but this is more than I expected for when I found a link on Delicious telling that the info here is quite decent. Thanks.

By: Techzilla

Techzilla — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:56:21 +0000

I Belive this article was VERY IMFORMATIVE and really hits the nail on the coffin. Belive me this feature is wanted (i wouldn’t even call it a feature it is basic design if you ask me)

and for the record @TOM
“A dump/load cycle, and hacking the dump is as reasonable workaround, when things go disastrously wrong. It is an extreme measure, but it is for extreme cases.”

this is nonsence, and if this horrible “workaround” didn’t exist we might have an existing obliterate today.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:36:08 +0000

http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=516

I quote the first two comments, look at the date:

===================================

Some people want the ability to permanently remove a file, dir, or revision from
history forever. This means rewriting the whole filesystem; a big deal. It
would also break existing working copies.

But hey, some folks want security. :-)

——- Additional comments from Ben Collins-Sussman Thu Oct 4 10:56:37 -0700 2001 ——-

1 week estimated, post-1.0

===================================

By: Magnanimous » Blog Archive » All aboard the Git train

Magnanimous » Blog Archive » All aboard the Git train — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:04:35 +0000

[...] subversion backup had grown to 400+ megabytes, mostly due to an infuriating 7-year old subversion bug/limitation/feature that won’t let you fully obliterate a file from the repository. It sucks to inadvertently [...]