[PATCH] Teach Mercurial to handle URLs of the form *sh://host/path, such as

[Matt Mackall]

On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 12:54 +0200, Pjotr Kourzanov wrote:
> What if you specifically need to use certain options for ssh (the 
> ssh), such as -1 or -2 or whatever. Isnt't it just easier to create a 
> wrapper called ssh1 or ssh2 and just use e.g., ssh1://host/path? What
> if you need to push/pull to/from sites that accept only ssh1 or ssh2?
> Do you want to constantly change your ui.ssh config or complicate the
> command line with -e?

ssh1 is of course another bad example as the protocol has been
completely broken. But even in this case, you would simply add this as a
setting to .ssh/config for the odd hosts that uses ssh1, and not mess
with hg's config at all.

>   My stake in this patch is that in a large project/organization, you
> can simply start using a krb5-rsh:// URLs and it will just work, while
> without it, you'd have to globally change out-of-the box configuration
> of Mercurial such that everyone uses ui.ssh=krb5-rsh. Oh yes, don't tell
> me the story of SSH public keys dispersal through a large company. It's
> just so much simpler with Kerberos - do a /usr/bin/kinit once and you're
> authenticated - no need for any public key transfers...

And if you were using a modern ssh with Kerberos support built in, you'd
a) be even safer [1] and b) have no config issues.

>   OK, here I stop and simply wonder why such a small and useful 
> generalization is so difficult to get in...

- it adds an infinite non-standard protocol namespace
- some parts of which will act bizarrely (eg bsh://)
- the infinite namespace doesn't even cover everything (eg dropbear)
- it's a bit ugly
- the use cases are unusual/silly enough to not be very convincing

[1] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~hildrum/043.pdf

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.