Mike Dewhirst wrote:
André Pönitz wrote:
Tim Hill wrote:
Apart from all the oddities that David mentions, what are the *real* needs for obliterate? I can only think of a few...
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My vote on obliterate is NO.
I think the original request for obliterate was to deal with very large binary files, earlier versions of which are surplus to requirements.
My understanding is that svn doesn't try to store deltas for binary data the way it does for text (source) files. IIRC it stores the entire file each time.
If that is correct, there might be an argument for Binary_Obliterate.
The caveat for such a facility would perhaps need to be along the lines of admin-only and oyohbi
Thinking about what I wrote above, maybe binary files could be marked by the user as "only_store_the_latest_version_obliterate_all_previous". If so, there would be no need for an obliterate anything.
OK I can see the hole in that. Subversion is a versioning system and obliterating anything in it subverts subversion. hmmmm... But what if you did let users mark stuff as unversioned_but_keep_the_latest_version? Maybe each obliterated item could be replaced by an entry pointing to the replacement item. A property of the entry would be a comment to that effect. Then when looking at the flow of events it would be clear what has happened - and who is to blame! Mike