version/revision control software for things mostly not source

[Chad Perrin]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 11:34:19PM +0300, Dan Naumov wrote:
> 
> I've looked at SVN and it looks reasonably easy to grok, but reading
> the "Version Control with Subversion" book... it seems there is no
> actual way to truly erase/delete/destoy/purge a part of an existing
> repository? This sounds rather weird and annoying. What if I decide
> that project XYZ is beyond redemption and abandon it, I delete the
> working copy of it, but all history is still in there, gigabytes upon
> gigabytes of data. With no way to remove it, it sounds like a really
> big limitation.

The idea is that a VCS maintains a record of past revisions of the files
in version control.  Thus, even if you delete/destroy an entire
subproject, it can later be recovered if necessary.

VCSes are designed with the idea that each project gets its own version
control repository.  If you want to delete a project, then, you delete
the repo for that particular project, and free up any space.  If you
maintain a huge filesystem containing lots of separate "projects", on the
other hand, you're essentially treating all of that filesystem as part of
the same super-project, from the point of view of the VCS.

Thus, there's nothing odd about the difficulty of clearing out part of
what's stored in the repository.  In fact, for purposes of recovering
things you suddenly realize you shouldn't have deleted, this is a feature
rather than a bug.  As others have already noted, though, there are
work-arounds that allow you to effectively delete something not just from
the current working version, but from the whole repo.  I won't repeat
them here.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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