Remote repository creation [was Re: Your favorite bug]

[Peter Arrenbrecht]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> 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.

Jesper of bitbucket just announced they have an API in the works.
-parren