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<title>Deleting Content From Fossil</title>
<h1 align="center">Deleting Content From Fossil</h1>
Fossil is designed to keep all historical content forever. Users
Fossil is designed to keep all historical content forever. Fossil
of Fossil are discouraged from "deleting" content simply because it
has become obsolete. Old content is part of the historical record
(part of the "fossil record") and should be maintained indefinitely.
Such is the design intent of Fossil.
deleting content. Such reasons might include:
deleting content. Such reasons include:
* Spammers have inserted inappropriate content into a wiki page
or ticket that needs to be removed.
* Spammers inserted inappropriate content into a wiki page, forum post,
or ticket. Fossil lets you easily hide or amend such content, but
since it is not a legitimate part of the project's history, there
is no value in keeping it, so it is best removed permanently.
* A file that contains trade secrets or that is under copyright
may have been accidentally committed and needs to be backed
* A file that contains trade secrets or that is under someone else's
copyright was accidentally committed and needs to be backed out.
out.
* A malformed control artifact may have been inserted and is
disrupting the operation of Fossil.
* A malformed control artifact was inserted and is disrupting the
operation of Fossil.
<h2>Alternatives</h2>
All of these are rare cases: Fossil is [./antibot.wiki | designed to
foil spammers up front], legally problematic check-ins should range from
rare to nonexistent, and you have to go way out of your way to force
Fossil to insert bad control artifacts. Therefore, before we get to
methods of permanently deleting content from a Fossil repos, let's give
some alternatives that usually suffice, which don't damage the project's
fossil record:
<ul>
<li><p>When a forum post or wiki article is "deleted," what actually
happens is that a new empty version is added to the Fossil
[./blockchain.md | block chain]. The web interface interprets this
as "deleted," but the prior version remains available if you go
digging for it.</p></li>
<li><p>When you close a ticket, it's marked in a way that causes it
to not show up in the normal ticket reports. You usually want to
give it a Resolution such as "Rejected" when this happens, plus
possibly a comment explaining why you're closing it. This is all new
information added to the ticket, not deletion.</p></li>
<li><p>When you <tt>fossil rm</tt> a file, a new manifest is
checked into the repository with the same file list as for the prior
version minus the "removed" file. The file is still present in the
repository; it just isn't part of that version forward on that
branch.</p></li>
<li><p>If you make a bad check-in, you can shunt it off to the side
by amending it to put it on a different branch, then continuing
development on the prior branch:
<p>
<tt>$ fossil amend abcd1234 --branch BOGUS --hide<br>
$ fossil up trunk</tt>
<p>
The first command moves check-in ID <tt>abcd1234</tt> (and any
subsequent check-ins on that branch!) to a branch called
<tt>BOGUS</tt>, then hides it so it doesn't show up on the
timeline. You can call this branch anything you like, and you can
re-use the same name as many times as you like. No content is
actually deleted: it's just shunted off to the side and hidden away.
You might find it easier to do this from the Fossil web UI in
the "edit" function for a check-in.
<p>
The second command returns to the last good check-in on that branch
so you can continue work from that point.</p></li>
<li><p>When the check-in you want to remove is followed by good
check-ins on the same branch, you can't use the previous method,
because it will move the good check-ins, too. The solution is:
<p>
<tt>$ fossil merge --backout abcd1234</tt>
<p>That creates a diff in the check-out directory that backs out the
bad check-in <tt>abcd1234</tt>. You then fix up any merge conflicts,
build, test, etc., then check the reverting change into the
repository. Again, nothing is actually deleted; you're just adding
more information to the repository which corrects a prior
check-in.</p></li>
</ul>
<h2>Shunning</h2>
Fossil provides a mechanism called "shunning" for removing content from
a repository.
Every Fossil repository maintains a list of the hash names of
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