How do you remove big files from history in mercurial?

Question

I have just created a mercurial repo created from a heterogeneous ecosystems of other repos. Before I publish it to my co-workers, I want to clean it as much as possible. To this end, I'd like to entirely remove a few big old files from history (pretend they never existed), so repo will be smaller.

Is this possible with mercurial?

Answer 1

Check out the convert extension, particularly the --filemap option.

Enable by adding the following to mercurial.ini:

[extensions] convert = 

Create a map of files to exclude:

exclude path/to/file1 exclude path/to/file2 

Then convert the repo:

hg convert srcrepo destrepo --filemap <map> 

Note there is a bug in Mercurial 2.1.1 causing an error with the above command:

initializing destination destrepo repository abort: invalid mode ('r') or filename 

Just add the --splicemap <nonexistent file> option to fix the problem.