Delete file with all history from svn repository

Question

Is there any way to delete file from svn repository including all its history? This issue emerges when I want to get rid of large binary file residing in repo.

I know only one approach that might help in this situation:

1. Dump all repo with the help of svnadmin utility.
2. Filter dumped file with grep. Grep should use filename and write in to the other dump-file
3. Import last dump-file with svnadmin

But this is too complicated and unreliable. Maybe there is another solution?

Answer 1

No this is the solution pretty much.

http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#removal

Answer 2

But this is too complicated and unreliable.

I wouldn't know why this shouldn't be considered reliable. However, if you want to completely get rid of the file, history and all, no matter what the effect on previous revisions this file was part of, there only is one way to do so and that way is indeed complicated. And rightly so. SVN is a tool with one single goal: never ever to lose any file, even after it was deleted. Forcing it to do otherwise ought to be hard.