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 kn

Answer 1

I was facing a similar issue, except that I needed to remove multiple files, not just one file, and also we are on Subversion 1.6 which doesn't support the --patern directive.

-- backup current SVN

$ cp -R /svn  /svnSAVE

-- dump repository

$ svnadmin dump /svn/root > svnDump

-- create new dump while excluding the very large file

$ svndumpfilter exclude "/path/file.csv" < svnDump > newSvnDump0
-- {note: should see a message like this}:
--          Dropped 1 node:
--                  '/path/file.csv'

-- create another new dump while excluding another very large file

$ svndumpfilter exclude "/path/anotherFile.csv" < newSvnDump0 > newSvnDump1

-- remove the old svn

$ rm -rf /svn

-- recreate the svn directories

$ mkdir -p /svn/root

-- recreate the SVN

$ svnadmin create /svn/root

-- repopulate the fresh repository with the dump

$ cat newSvnDump1 | svnadmin load /svn/root

-- update the conf files from the saved copy into the new copy...

$ cp /svnSAVE/root/conf/* /svn/root/conf

Now the repository should not contain the 2 large files "file.csv" and "anotherFile.csv"