Subject: [PATCH] clone: allow cloning local paths with colons in them

From: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2013 10:36:18 +0700

Usually "foo:bar" is interpreted as an ssh url. This patch allows to
clone from such paths by putting at least one slash before the colon
(i.e. /path/to/foo:bar or just ./foo:bar).

file://foo:bar should also work, but local optimizations are off in
that case, which may be unwanted. While at there, warn the users about
--local being ignored in this case.

Reported-by: William Giokas <[email-masked]>
Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <[email-masked]>
---
 On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 10:35 PM, Jeff King <[email-masked]> wrote:
 > So I think one reasonable path would be:
 >
 >   1. Do not treat "host:path" as ssh if "host" has a slash, which should
 >      not regress anybody. It does not allow unadorned relative paths
 >      with colons, but it lets you use absolute paths or "./" to
 >      disambiguate.
 >
 >   2. Teach git-clone to ask the transport code to parse the source repo
 >      spec, and decide from that whether it is local or not. That would
 >      harmonize the implementations and avoid errors when you _did_ mean
 >      to use ssh, but "host:path" happens to exist in your filesystem. I
 >      also would not be surprised if there are problems with
 >      URL-encoding, but maybe clone handles that properly (I didn't
 >      check).
 >
 > And the "host contains slash" rule is pretty easy to explain in the
 > documentation, which is good.

 I totally agree with this. But doing #2 seems to require a bit of
 code reorganization. How about just this for now?

 Documentation/urls.txt | 6 ++++++
 builtin/clone.c        | 2 ++
 connect.c              | 7 +++++--
 t/t5601-clone.sh       | 5 +++++
 4 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/urls.txt b/Documentation/urls.txt
index 3ca122f..476e338 100644
--- a/Documentation/urls.txt
+++ b/Documentation/urls.txt
@@ -23,6 +23,12 @@ An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh protocol:
 
 - {startsb}user@{endsb}host.xz:path/to/repo.git/
 
+This syntax is only recognized if there are no slashes before the
+first colon. This helps differentiate a local path that contains a
+colon. For example the local path `foo:bar` could be specified as an
+absolute path or `./foo:bar` to avoid being misinterpreted as an ssh
+url.
+
 The ssh and git protocols additionally support ~username expansion:
 
 - ssh://{startsb}user@{endsb}host.xz{startsb}:port{endsb}/~{startsb}user{endsb}/path/to/repo.git/
diff --git a/builtin/clone.c b/builtin/clone.c
index 58fee98..e13da4d 100644
--- a/builtin/clone.c
+++ b/builtin/clone.c
@@ -783,6 +783,8 @@ int cmd_clone(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 	is_local = option_local != 0 && path && !is_bundle;
 	if (is_local && option_depth)
 		warning(_("--depth is ignored in local clones; use file:// instead."));
+	if (option_local > 0 && !is_local)
+		warning(_("--local is ignored"));
 
 	if (argc == 2)
 		dir = xstrdup(argv[1]);
diff --git a/connect.c b/connect.c
index f57efd0..b568f10 100644
--- a/connect.c
+++ b/connect.c
@@ -551,8 +551,11 @@ struct child_process *git_connect(int fd[2], const char *url_orig,
 	path = strchr(end, c);
 	if (path && !has_dos_drive_prefix(end)) {
 		if (c == ':') {
-			protocol = PROTO_SSH;
-			*path++ = '\0';
+			if (!strchr(url, '/') || strchr(url, '/') >= path) {
+				protocol = PROTO_SSH;
+				*path++ = '\0';
+			} else
+				path = end;
 		}
 	} else
 		path = end;
diff --git a/t/t5601-clone.sh b/t/t5601-clone.sh
index 67869b4..0629149 100755
--- a/t/t5601-clone.sh
+++ b/t/t5601-clone.sh
@@ -280,4 +280,9 @@ test_expect_success 'clone checking out a tag' '
 	test_cmp fetch.expected fetch.actual
 '
 
+test_expect_success NOT_MINGW,NOT_CYGWIN 'clone local path foo:bar' '
+	cp -R src "foo:bar" &&
+	git clone "./foo:bar" foobar
+'
+
 test_done
-- 
1.8.2.83.gc99314b