Re: [PATCH] remote-hg: store converted URL

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:

If I understand correctly, the $backend::$opaqueToken is a contract between the remote-helper and the remote-$backend that says "When user wants to interact with the same (foreign) repository, we agreed to let her use 'origin' nickname. The remote-helper looks up this opaque token that corresponds to 'origin' and gives it to the remote-$backend, and whatever is in the opaque token should be sufficient for the remote-$backend to figure out how to proceed from there".

But in this hg::../over/there case, it seems that string is not sufficient for remote-hg to do so and the contract is broken.

When "git clone $backend::$opaqueToken repo" is run in /dir/ecto/ry, and then subsequent "git fetch origin" will be run in (a subdirectory of) /dir/ecto/ry/repo, but anything relative to /dir/ecto/ry will not work once you go inside /dir/ecto/ry/repo. The "create a new repository here" argument could even be an absolute path to a totally different place, so if the remote-$backend wants to use $opaqueToken as anything relative to the $(cwd) when "git clone" was invoked, that original location needs to be available somehow.

Would a new helper protocol message be necessary, so that the backend can rewrite the $opaqueToken at "clone" time and tell the helper what to store as URL instead of the original? I do not think that is much different from remote-$backend updating the value of the remote.origin.URL using "git config".

An alternative approach may be for somebody (either the "git clone" or the remote-$backend) to store a "base directory" when "git clone" was invoked in remote.origin.dirAtCloneTime variable, so that the next time remote-$backend runs, it can read that directory and interpret the $opaqueToken as a relative path to that directory if it wants to. That way, nobody needs to rewrite $opaqueToken.

How do other remote helpers solve this, I have to wonder, though. By not allowing relative paths to a directory?