Here is a post describing a process I used to "change history" in a repo. Perhaps it might be useful to someone at some point.
Two years ago I started using fossil to track my personal website / blog. My plan at the time was to use a static site generator and to keep the generated content under version control as well, to simplify the process of pushing to my actual website after editing and building the blog. As it turns out, this wasn't a great plan. As a result, I had a 200 MB repository holding tons of build artifacts that I really didn't need to keep around. So I decided to rebuild my repository, removing the cruft that can be rebuilt on demand, and just keeping the other pieces. In git this would be "no problem" of course (other than the problem that I was using git). I could throw away stuff willy nilly. Since I'm using Windows, I was inclined to just use a batch file to migrate individual commits from the old repo to a new repo, excluding the pieces I no longer wanted to keep track of. Before I could do that, I needed to "clean up" the existing repo a little bit. I had used some special characters in comments that would trip up batch processing (parentheses, quotation marks, ampersands, percent signs, vertical bars and less than / greater than symbols; anything else that would cause cmd.exe to choke), so I edited the offending commit comments in the old repository. Maybe a dozen or so in my case. Next I opened a copy of old repository at the initial empty commit. Then I created a new empty repository using the --date-override, --template and --admin-user options to initialize the desired state. I wrote the following batch file named donext.bat that would do the annoying repetitive work: ********** @echo off pushd D:\path\to\old\checkout fossil update next fossil status > D:\path\to\temp.txt popd rem modify the /xf and /xd parameters as needed to exclude the parts you don't want in the new repository robocopy D:\path\to\old\checkout D:\path\to\new\checkout *.* /mir /xf _FOSSIL_ /xf *.pyc /xd public for /f "delims=" %%L in (D:\path\to\temp.txt) do call :getvar "%%L" pushd D:\path\to\new\checkout fossil addremove fossil commit --date-override %dndatetime: =T% -m "%dncomment%" rem the following isn't strictly necessary, but it gave me some idea where I was in the process fossil timeline popd goto :EOF :getvar set dnline=%~1 if "%dnline:~0,9%"=="checkout:" set dndatetime=%dnline:~55,-4% if "%dnline:~0,8%"=="comment:" set dncomment=%dnline:~14,-14% goto :EOF ********** My old repository had 107 commits after the initial empty commit. So I ran one final command line: for /L %L in (1,1,107) do donext.bat Which ran my donext.bat file 107 times, migrating all the commits to the new repository without the generated artifacts. I don't see this being something I'm likely to need again, but I wanted to document it in case it was useful for someone else as an example of how it might be done on a Windows platform (where "someone" might be me when I find out I have another use for it but long since deleted the "trivial" batch file). Certainly a lot easier than trying to do all those steps manually 107 times. In the end it "failed to commit" about 10 or so because there were no differences (all the differences were in no omitted artifacts). And my useful repository is about half the size it was before. Note that this script is not a generic tool that will Just Work(TM) on your repository setup. It makes assumptions likely unique to my configuration (hard coded paths, a single user name being used for all commits, no branches, maybe more). Still, it might be a useful reference. -- Scott Robison
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