Mercurial: Remove file from all changesets

Question

I understand how to remove an entire changeset from history but it's not clear how to remove a subset instead.

For example, how do I remove all DLL files from an existing changeset while leaving the source-code alone?

Answer 1

Because the revision ids (e.g. a8d7641f...) are based on a hash of the changeset, it's not really possible to remove a subset of a changeset from history.

However, it is possible to create a new repo with a parallel history, except for a certain set of files, by using the Convert extension. You'll be converting a Mercurial repo to a Mercurial repo, using the filemap to exclude the files you don't want by adding excludes. This will create a new, unrelated repository, which means that any clones people have won't be able to pull from it any more, and will have to re-clone from this new repo.

Answer 2

1. Make sure all your teammates have pushed their local changes to the central repo (if any)
2. Backup your repository
3. Create a "map.txt" file with the following content:

   # this filemap is used to exclude specific files
   exclude "subdir/filename1.ext"
   exclude "subdir/filename2.ext"
   exclude "subdir2"

4. Run this command:

   hg convert --filemap map.txt c:/oldrepo c:/newrepo

   NOTE: You have to use "forward-slash" in paths, even on windows.
5. Wait and be patient
6. Now you have a new repo at c:\newrepo but without the files

PS. In the "upper" repo you have to remove all changesets and re-push your new repo.

PPS. I actually wrote a blog post about this that has more details (including stripping the changesest in Bitbucket etc.