RFC: Managing Mercurial Repositories Remotely

[Jesse Glick]

Peter Arrenbrecht wrote:
> This is a somewhat lengthy proposal for an extension that supports
> running a limited set of hg commands server-side.

This would be very welcome. Having to rely on a human admin, or custom 
admin scripts, just to create new clones on the server is a pain.

> == hg rclone et al. ==

However I am confused at the plethora of commands. To my mind, there are 
only two primitive commands which must be supported:

* hg rinit $name (~ ssh server hg init $name)
* hg rdrop $name (~ ssh server rm -rf $name)

(An admin might want to disable the rdrop command or change it to move 
the repo to a "junk" directory.)

If you can create a new repository on the server, you can prepare 
whatever content for it you wish on your own local disk using regular Hg 
commands, and then push in the desired changesets. As a concession to 
performance, especially for people with limited upload bandwidth trying 
to clone very large repositories, it would be good to add

* hg rclone -r $rev $old $new (~ ssh server hg clone -r $rev $old $new)

since otherwise you would have to upload megabytes of history which the 
server already has in an existing repo.

Everything else you can do locally given the existing network operations 
of clone, pull, and push. This does not apply to MQ operations, which 
involve nonmonotonic changes to history, but I don't really see what you 
need to do with MQ on a server other than create a versioned patch 
queue, which is possibly simply with

$ hg rinit existing-repo/.hg/patches
$ hg -R .hg/patches push http://server/existing-repo/.hg/patches