Mercurial repository on FTP

Question

Hi all. I wonder, if it's possible to create and serve to the clients Mercurial repository on the some FTP folder with RW access . Did someone do a thing like that ? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

All things are possible. But that would be hard.

The bit where the network transport matters is when cloning a repository, and the standard ways of doing that depend on either serving over HTTP, or having SSH access to the repository host. There's no FTP-based transport for cloning as far as I can see.

If that's the only sharing mechanism you have available, then you could probably work something out using Mercurial bundles. The procedure would be something like the following:

1. Commit your edits to a local repository
2. Make a bundle using hg bundle --all my-bundle.hg
3. FTP my-bundle.hg to the server

The other users of the repository can then use FTP to retrieve the my-bundle.hg file to their local machine, go to their local copy of the repository, and then hg pull my-bundle.hg to pull in any revisions which are in the bundle but not in the local repository. When they want to share their changes, they make a fresh bundle as above, and push that back to the server. The --all option puts all of the changesets into the bundle file -- you can be cleverer and only export 'recent' changes, but that gets a little more complicated and risks losing changesets: using --all is brutal but fail-safe.

There's obviously a fair amount of scope for confusion here, and race conditions (timestamped filenames might help), and hair-pulling-out, and your users would doubtless appreciate some scripts to make this easier, but if all you've got available is an FTP server, you don't have very many options.

Good luck.

Answer 2

This question on SuperUser might be interesting. The core idea seem to evolve around running a background process that synchronizes a local folder with a remote ftp folder. Which might of use to you.

But I dont know what happens when more than one user tries synchronize at the same time. Since using this approach bypasses all the protection that mercurial has regarding locking the tree and such.