version control - Is there a way to remove the history for a single file in Mercurial?

Question

I think I already know the answer to this but thought I would ask anyway:

We have a file that got added to a Mercurial repository with sensitive information in it. Is there any way to remove that file along with its change history without removing the whole repo?

Answer 1

It is correct that you cannot easily remove a particular file from Mercurial in the sense that doing so will disrupt all the changeset IDs in your repository. When you change the changeset IDs, everybody has to re-clone the repository. See the Wiki page about editing history for information about the consequences of modifying the history in Mercurial.

If that is okay to you (internal repository in a company), then take a look at the convert extension. It can do hg → hg conversions and has a --filemap argument which can be used to exclude files, among other things.