Remote repository creation [was Re: Your favorite bug]

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, 2009-03-12 at 04:18 -0400, Jorge Vargas wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 7:27 AM, Paul Crowley <paul at lshift.net> wrote:
> > Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> >> Matt Mackall <mpm <at> selenic.com> writes:
> >>>> It's too late for the feature freeze, but I'd like to suggest remote
> >> repository
> >>>> creation (with ssh://...
> >>> hg init ssh://foo
> >>
> >> How can I have thought this didn't exist? Well, sorry for the noise then :-S
> >
> > Or "hg clone . ssh://foo/foo" (which does an init followed by a push).
> > This is supported by mercurial-server.
> 
> I have been thinking this over and even though I eventually figured
> that one out.
> 
> I think we still need a way to automate this better, specially if you
> don't want to give SSH access to people for creating repo.
> 
> Ideally I'll like to see something like
> 
> hg init http://mysite.com/hg
> <ask for auth>
> <ask for default values to populate the hgrc>

I'm actually not excited by this idea. Managing a remote repository
without shell access is not a simple thing. Once we've initialized a
remote repository, people will want to edit hgrc values, clone between
remote repos, remove repos, etc. And then we need a whole process for
deciding who's allowed to do what to what repo. And this is way beyond
the scope of what we want to do in the tool. This is why people have
gone to the trouble of creating things like bitbucket and freehg.

With ssh, you basically get all of the above for free by virtue of the
fact that the operating system already does access control and you can
run a remote editor.

That said, it would be really clever if the bitbucket folks wrote an
extension to do some of the above for their site from the command line.
Or if someone took freehg and turned it into an easy-to-deploy solution,
again with remote tools.

-- 
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