Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Possible to destructively modify an archive?

[Matthew Dempsky]

Rob Browning <address@hidden> writes:

> Imagine you accidentally commit something very large to an archive and
> you want to remove it, or imagine you're legally required to remove
> some project from a large archive.  Are removals possible?
>
> Along the same lines, is it possible to "export" part of an archive
> and then import that part into some position in another archive?
> While I realize that in the normal case, this probably shouldn't be
> done (or rather should just be done via tagging), I still wondered if
> this was possible.

In general, manually screwing around with files in an arch archive is
considered a Bad Thing (TM).  If you don't *absolutely understand* the
consequences of the changes you've made, it's best that you don't even
try.

That said, it's typically actually pretty safe to delete things from
an arch archive: it runs fairly similar to having an incomplete mirror
of an archive (arch will detect this and complain to you).  The real
problem is if you delete something and then put something different in
it's place.  If someone has merged this change into their branch
already, everything will get hosed if you try to change it.

The only time I've ever changed files pushed to my public archive is
once when I commited a few patches using BSD tar by accident and then
Debian's tar couldn't handle them correctly.  I just repackaged the
tarballs in my mirror with GNU tar and swapped them out and nobody
noticed.