I was reviewing the progress of the Mecurial HTTP authentication features in this edition and I can see there has been some progress in that area, but I'm still getting failures. It has made me think about the complexities of repository configuration. In my case I use an online service provider (Fogcreek) who have a Kiln authentication plugin to my Mecurial.ini file that handles authentication. If I extrapolate the plugin configuration issues out, I'm not sure how I could configure Continua to handle files that include authentication details for the "runner".
The issue we are having with https validation is that the only commands that can be run over https are clone/push/pull… status (which is what we use for local and over ssh) results in the error you are seeing. We’re still deciding what to do about this. It’s likely we’ll just handle the ‘not local’ error and treat that as success, since we see a different error with authentication or an invalid repo.
We also need to do some more testing with Kiln. We use mercurial internally as the source code transport between the server and the agents… for non mercurial repos we wrapper them with hg, but for hg repos we just use them as is. My concern with kiln is that their extensions may break our transport. We’ve been testing ssl support using bitbucket so I know that plain hg over ssl does work.
I’ll admit that the current https://{username}:{password}@{hg url} solution in Continua is of a worry with a password in the URL. I understand Kiln are working on SSH support, which might negate this discussion in the long run. That feature isn’t complete at the moment, but has been on their radar for some time.
