Delete file with all history from svn repository

Question

Is there any way to delete file from svn repository including all its history? This issue emerges when I want to get rid of large binary file residing in repo.

I know only one approach that might help in this situation:

1. Dump all repo with the help of svnadmin utility.
2. Filter dumped file with grep. Grep should use filename and write in to the other dump-file
3. Import last dump-file with svnadmin

But this is too complicated and unreliable. Maybe there is another solution?

Answer 1

This has recently become much more straightforward with the command svndumpfilter. Details are available in the subversion documentation here. Basically, to avoid conflicts (explained here), it takes a repo dump and redoes each commit, either including or excluding a given file prefix. Basic syntax:

svndumpfilter exclude yourfileprefix < yourdump > yournewdump 

Exclude is probably what the question asker is looking for, but you can also use include to, say, extract a subtree of the repo so as to spin it off as its own repository.

The latest revision of subversion in subversion (very meta) can also take glob patterns. I recently had to remove all pdfs from a repo and it was very easily done like so:

svndumpfilter exclude --pattern '*.pdf' < dump > dump_nopdfs 

Further usage information can be found by calling svndumpfilter help and svndumpfilter help exclude.

Answer 2

But this is too complicated and unreliable.

I wouldn't know why this shouldn't be considered reliable. However, if you want to completely get rid of the file, history and all, no matter what the effect on previous revisions this file was part of, there only is one way to do so and that way is indeed complicated. And rightly so. SVN is a tool with one single goal: never ever to lose any file, even after it was deleted. Forcing it to do otherwise ought to be hard.