I was thinking more along the lines of what you were attempting to do locally but with downstream effect: mark the blob itself as intentionally deleted rather t

I was thinking more along the lines of what you were attempting to do locally but with downstream effect: mark the blob itself as intentionally deleted rather than missing or corrupted. This would leave all hashes the same, which sidesteps the much larger coordination problem. To cover the rollback case in your comment, give git checkout a safe mode (either with the default being safe and requiring —-force to override or an explicit —-safe) that fails if the tree-ish points to any deleted blob. How to propagate this change is a delicate matter because any fetch may reach back and destructively update my local clone. When I’ve wished for this feature, it has always been in the context of a central team repository. Being able to delete an object from the central repository at least has the benefit of subsequent clones not being bloated by the 350-megabyte file. Presumably people with access to the team’s central repository can be trusted to wield this power responsibly. Other members of the team may optionally run the hypothetical git delete-object ffff9999 to shrink their respective clones. Leaving it as plumbing to be run on a repository to which one has administrative access seems like a decent balance. This could be a potentially expensive operation because replacing a packed object with a known-but-deleted object would trigger a repack. The ripple effect of this new special case — new object type, really — would be nontrivial and a change that would break backward compatibility.