Re: [PATCH v2] Documentation/remote-helpers: Add invocation section

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 30, 2010, 19:59 UTC
Message-ID: <20100330195910.GB10977@progeny.tock>
In-Reply-To: <f3271551003301217h44c99d5bye4a614840661b05c@mail.gmail.com>

Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 12:07 AM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

>>  The URL in the second argument can be an arbitrary string.  It is up
>>  to the remote helper to assign meaning to it.
>
> I'm not sure this is correct. Here's an excerpt from remote.c
> 	if (argc > 2) {
> 		url = argv[2];
> 	} else {
> 		url = remote->url[0];
> 	}
> Notice how url is set to remote->url[0], in the `else` branch, where
> the remote is an "ordinary remote" built by remote_get(). Even though
> url may be any arbitrary string in the `if` branch, there'll be
> problems when the program gets into the `else` branch transparently.

Not sure I understand. Are there restrictions on the content of remote->url[0]?

What I meant by "arbitrary string" is that it doesn’t have to have the form schema://path, it’s not restricted to a particular character set, it doesn’t have to avoid conflicting with meaningful URLs defined by other helpers, and so on. So it’s a resource locator but not very uniform.

This is probably not very relevant to the user, but it should be relevant to the remote helper writer, I think.

Jonathan