If you can't remember history, rewrite it so you can.

If you can't remember history, rewrite it so you can.

By Brian Gottreu
Date: Monday, 8 June 2015 16:30
Duration: 50 minutes
Target audience: Beginner
Language: English
Tags: git

You can find more information on the speaker's site:


There are many reasons why one might want to rewrite the commit history of a Git repository, but there are just as many reasons why rewriting history is a bad idea. In this talk I'll discuss a few different scenarios where rewriting Git history may be a reasonable course of action.

They include:
* preparing a sloppy personal project for public release
* removing secrets from a repository
* removing large files and transferring them to a separate git-annex repository
* fixing inadvertent commits and merges from misuse of git-annex
* and redoing a git filter-branch or two that went poorly

I'll also talk about introducing git-annex into an existing project, writing custom Git commands, and a tool to create small comprehensible Git repositories to try things out on.


Attended by: Curtis Jewell (‎CSJewell‎), Garth Hill, Daniel Fackrell, Jared Miller, Kent Schaeffer, Mark Gardner (‎mjgardner‎), James Morgan (‎Ven'Tatsu‎), Jan Peterson (‎jlp‎), David Oswald (‎davido‎), Thomas Stanton (‎tstanton‎), Peter Sandin, Cora Davis, Abigail, Aran Deltac (‎bluefeet‎), Andrew Grangaard (‎spazm‎), Belden Lyman (‎belden‎), Norman Yamada, Matthew Green, Mike Greb (‎mikegrb‎), Tim Bunce, Bruce Gray (‎Util‎), Matt Finkel, R Geoffrey Avery (‎rGeoffrey‎),