Re: [PATCH 1/8] Make the "traditionally-supported" URLs a special case

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 4, 2009, 10:50 UTC
Message-ID: <7vk50fugpn.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0909041232500.4605@intel-tinevez-2-302>

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Show 7 quoted lines

> The special case is "http://" and "https://" which might indicate foreign 
> VCS repositories.
>
> In all other cases, I am afraid that you are complicating the glove.
>
> Remember: the whole purpose of the "foreign VCS" helpers is user 
> convenience.

Sorry, but you completely lost me here.

Here are two URLs that follows your "user convenience" principle.

	http://example.xz/repos/frotz.git/
	http://example.xz/repo/frotz/trunk/

How do you tell, without relying on .git and trunk, the former is a git repository and wants the dumb walker transport to fetch from, while the latter is probably a svn and you would either use "svn checkout", or use "git clone" on it via the svn helper?

Well, you don't.

One possible "convenient user interface" would be to say

	svn+http://example.xz/repo/frotz/trunk/

(or use :: instead of + as the helper-name separator, as we agreed not to
decide on it)
        
This would give us

 (1) it is clear that it literally is what you would give to git and
     trigger the svn helper; and

 (2) to people who know how canonical git URLs with foreign helper are
     spelled, it also is clear that you can use "svn checkout" on
     everything after "svn+" in it.

     A corollary to this is that you can also use "git svn init" on it.

Compared to that, if you do not have any such prefix, how would that be more convenient to the users?

Or perhaps you have an alternative in mind that is more convenient for the users and that is not "use identically looking http://... for both", but you are being unnecessarily cryptic by not spelling out what it is.