Fossil

It wouldn't make sense for this to be built into "clone"; a separate "autoclone" command that fetched the given url and looked for the link reference and then called "clone". This functionality can be achieved with an external 2-line shell script, but that goes against fossil's all-in-one philosophy.

drh added on 2010-03-19 01:06:30:
I do not understand what is being requested here. Please elaborate.

anonymous added on 2010-03-19 02:47:35:
It would not be a stretch to say that this feature request is poorly thought-out, needless bloat, or unnecessary.

The inspiration comes from setting up a self-hosted project on sourceforge. The project homepage is http://myproject.sourceforge.net/ which can be redirected (with php) to some other page. As it stands, I don't think fossil will follow a 301/302 http redirect, so it would do no good to instruct people to "fossil clone http://lilypad.sourceforge.net". They need to find the explicit url of the repository and use "fossil clone http://lilypad.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/lilypad.fsl" But wouldn't it be nice if they could just use the home page?

Just following redirects is helpful but not enough - what if the home page is still some plain html page? So instead, if the home page had some indicator on it to allow a program to discover where the source is (similar to rss autodiscovery) then an interested user/developer could clone the repository right from the home page, without needing to track down the link to the actual repository. (I don't know if any other systems have a similar convention, but if such a thing became widespread the search engines could make use of it)

The effect would be roughly the same as the shell command:

$ fossil clone `curl http://app-landing-page | grep '<link rel="fossil-source" '| sed 's/.*href="[^"]"/\1/'`

anonymous added on 2010-03-19 06:48:33:
IMO, it is not a problem of fossil. Use RewriteEngine or whatever else. It would be enough. My Apache .htaccess is like:

# You don't need this part:
<FilesMatch "\.repo$">
  Options +ExecCGI
  AddHandler cgi-script .repo
  RewriteEngine Off
</FilesMatch>

# But you need this (you might want to replace foo.repo with /cgi-bin/foo.cgi):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Fossil/\[[a-z0-9]{10}\]
RewriteRule ^(.*) /foo.repo/$1 [L]