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?

Accepted Answer

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 ``` 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 ` option to fix the problem.

How do you remove big files from history in mercurial?

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