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1 Git:Changing Project Licensing
2 ==============================
3 :author: Aaron Ball
4 :email: nullspoon@iohq.net
5
6
7 == {doctitle}
8
9 I'm unsure about the legality of doing something like this. I think though that
10 this probably shouldn't be used if you've already released your project. If
11 however you have not yet released and have changed your mind to use a different
12 license prior to its release, this may be just the post for you.
13
14 I recently was working on a project that prior to releasing, I decided upon
15 using the Apache V2 license. After something thinking though (and about 10
16 commits), I decided I wanted to release this project under the copyleft
17 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html[GPL v2] license. Unfortunately
18 though, I had already commited the LICENSE file as well as put the shortened
19 license header at the top of my program's files. Thankfully, git has a
20 solution to fix this problem. However, we will have to fix this in two steps
21 since we will be rewriting a certain file as well as deleting another entirely
22 (LICENSE).
23
24 [[removing-a-file-section-throughout-history]]
25 == Removing a File Section Throughout History
26
27 ----
28 git filter-branch -f --tree-filter "if link:\$(grep_'Apache'_somefile)[\$(grep 'Apache' somefile)]; then sed -i -e '2,16d' somefile; fi"
29 ----
30
31 What this does is modify the contents of file **somefile**. Effectively, for
32 each commit in history (+git filter-branch --tree-filter+), this checks if the
33 file *somefile* contains the string __Apache__. If it does, it then uses sed to
34 do an inline edit to delete lines 2-16 (those are the lines containing my
35 license header). You will likely need to change those since not all license
36 headers are the same length (and don't start at line 2).
37
38 [[deleting-a-file-from-history]]
39 == Deleting a File From History
40
41 Now that we've cleaned out the license header, we just need to remove the
42 LICENSE file from all of history so we can put a new one in. To do this, we're
43 going to use the *--index-filter* switch.
44
45 ----
46 git filter-branch -f --index-filter 'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch ./LICENSE'
47 ----
48
49 Something to note about the _git rm_ command we just ran. Notice the
50 _--ignore-unmatch_ switch. That will make git rm return a 0 status even if the
51 specified file is not found. Basically, that means that it will keep the git
52 filter-branch command from exiting when it happens upon a commit where the file
53 doesn't currently exist.
54
55
56
57 Category:Git
58
59
60 // vim: set syntax=asciidoc:
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