Quickest Way to Validate a Repository URL

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2014-06-10 at 18:45 +0000, Jensen, Aaron wrote:
> What's the quickest way to validate that a URL points to a Mercurial repository? Using the Mercurial commands, the best I could find was the id command:
> 
>     > hg id https://example.com
> 
> Is there a better/faster way?
> 
> Another approach would be to make a capabilities request:
> 
>     > curl https://example.com?cmd=capabilities
> 
> And check that it returned an HTTP 200 status.

That'll succeed on pages that don't care about query parameters.

Mercurial speaks two protocols over HTTP, dynamic and static. So our
process looks like:

# (httppeer.py: instance())
try:
   # dynamic first
   send capabilities request
   parse response # _callstream
     check content-type is text/plain, application/mercurial-*
     ...
except:
   # fall back to static (statichttprepo.py)

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.