How do I remove git history before a chosen point

Question

I have a Xcode project going back 2.5 years. I did a release 1 year ago, and implemented a number of changes, basically to adopt ARC. The project has git "history" going back 2 years. I recently deleted branches before release and did a git prune (at the git command line), which reduced the number of objects stored, but I still have history back to 2011. Anything before the previous Release is of no interest (using GC) and I want to completely remove this. I have had unpleasant experiences with git in the past, and frankly find the documentation confusing, so I am reluctant to try anything I do not really understand. I want to delete all before a given commit (the previous Release) but retain detail of recent changes.

Answer 1

I think, this answer solves your problem: https://stackoverflow.com/a/598788/119725

In practice, what you'll do is to combine the first N commits (initial up to the last commit before that release) into a new single initial commit.

I would of course recommend to do all that magic on a new clone of your repository, so you can go back (easily) in case anything goes wrong.