Live Merging from remote repositories

If you are merging from many distributed developers, than you would need to replicate every one of their repositories into your own. Is this necessary?

I have been looking at Junio's code for merging, and it looks like it would be (relatively) easy change to make it run live across two remote repositories - assuming "future" science to develop remote common ancestor lookup...

IE, merge.pl $COMMON-BASE $LOCAL-CHANGESET remote::$REMOTE-CHANGESET

To make this work, only a couple of things need to happen:
1) be able to remotely run "remote::diff-tree $BASE $REMOTE-CHANGESET", and
copy the results over the net to the place in the script where it is done
locally. This is not a LOT of data, and is bounded by the number of total
number of blobs in the resulting tree.

2) When a remote blob is required (for merging, or copying), then copy it
from the remote .git/objects to the local one. You only copy the blobs that
will end up in the merged result (or be used for file merge).

The way Junio has done it, no intermediate trees or commits are used...

You don't copy remote's tree of commits between $BASE and $REMOTE-CHANGESET, or any of their associated trees and blobs (unless used to merge).

Is this a bug or a feature?

Barry Silverman