Re: Announcing a new (prototype) git-remote-hg tool

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 5, 2014, 23:13 UTC
Message-ID: <20141205231330.GL16345@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20141205225930.GA29256@peff.net>

Jeff King wrote:

> One of the nice things about spinning remote-hg out of the core repo is
> that it means we do not have to endorse a particular implementation, and
> they can compete with each other on their merits.

True.

[...]

> It's a shame that both squat on the name "remote-hg", because it makes
> it difficult to tell the two apart. But of course that is the only way
> to make "git clone hg::..." work. Maybe we need a layer of indirection?
> :)

If the helpers are roughly interchangeable (that is, if you can switch between fetching using each one into the same on-disk git repository), then picking one to symlink as git-remote-hg in your $PATH should be enough.

If they don't have that level of interoperability, then there's an argument to be made that the URLs shouldn't be the same. Unfortunately url.*.insteadof rules are resolved at fetch time instead of being resolved once and the result recorded in .git/config. So yes, it seems like a way to have abbreviations for URLs (e.g., hg:: meaning hg+mh:: or hg+fc::) that get resolved at clone time would be useful. It's a layer of indirection we don't provide. :/

Thanks, Jonathan