There are special cases where you
might want to destroy all evidence of
a file or commit. (Perhaps somebody
accidentally committed a confidential
document.) This isn’t so easy,because
Subversion is deliberately designed to
never lose information. Revisions are
immutable trees which build upon one
another. Removing a revision from
history would cause a domino effect,
creating chaos in all subsequent
revisions and possibly invalidating
all working copies.
The project has plans,however,to
someday implement an svnadmin
obliterate command which would
accomplish the task of permanently
deleting information. (See issue 516.)
In the meantime,your only recourse is to svnadmin dump your repository,then pipe the dumpfile through svndumpfilter (excluding the bad path) into an svnadmin load command. See chapter 5 of the Subversion book for details about this.
