197d10e157ce subtly changed the HTTP peer's handling of HTTP redirects.
Before that changeset, we instantiated an HTTP peer instance and
performed the capabilities lookup with that instance. The old code had
the following relevant properties:
- The HTTP request layer would automatically follow HTTP redirects.
- An encountered HTTP redirect would update a peer instance variable pointing to the repo URL.
- The peer would automagically perform a "capabilities" command request if a caller requested capabilities but capabilities were not yet defined.
The first HTTP request issued by a peer is for ?cmd=capabilities. If
the server responds with an HTTP redirect to a ?cmd=capabilities URL,
the HTTP request layer automatically followed it, retrieved a valid
capabilities response, and the peer's base URL was updated
automatically so subsequent requests used the proper URL. In other
words, things "just worked."
In the case where the server redirected to a URL without the
?cmd=capabilities query string, the HTTP request layer would follow
the redirect and likely encounter HTML. The peer's base URL would be
updated and the unexpected Content-Type would raise a RepoError. We
would catch RepoError and immediately call between() (testing the case
for pre 0.9.1 servers not supporting the "capabilities" command). e.g.
try: inst._fetchcaps() except error.RepoError: inst.between([(nullid, nullid)])
between() would eventually call into _callstream(). And _callstream()
made a call to self.capable('httpheader'). capable() would call
self.capabilities(), which would see that no capabilities were set
(because HTML was returned for that request) and call the "capabilities"
command to fetch capabilities. Because the base URL had been updated
from the redirect, this 2nd "capabilities" command would succeed and
the client would immediately call "between," which would also succeed.
The legacy handshake succeeded. Only because "capabilities" was
successfully executed as a side effect did the peer recognize that it
was talking to a modern server. In other words, this all appeared to
work accidentally.
After 197d10e157ce, we stopped calling the "capabilities" command on
the peer instance. Instead, we made the request via a low-level opener,
detected the redirect as part of response handling code, and passed the
redirected URL into the constructed peer instance.
For cases where the redirected URL included the query string, this
"just worked." But for cases where the redirected URL stripped the query
string, we threw RepoError and because we removed the "between" handshake
fallback, we fell through to the "is a static HTTP repo" check and
performed an HTTP request for .hg/requires.
While 197d10e157ce was marked as backwards incompatible, the only
intended backwards incompatible behavior was not performing the
"between" fallback. It was not realized that the "between" command
had the side-effect of recovering from an errant redirect that
dropped the query string.
This commit restores the previous behavior and allows clients to
handle a redirect that drops the query string. In the case where
the request is redirected and the query string is dropped, we raise
a special case of RepoError. We then catch this special exception in
the handshake code and perform another "capabilities" request against
the redirected URL. If that works, all is well. Otherwise, we fall back
to the "is a static HTTP repo" check.
The new could is arguably better than before 197d10e157ce, as it is
explicit about the expected behavior and we avoid performing a
"between" request, saving a server round trip.
Nit: baseurl=url seems not correct here since we've explicitly followed the redirect.
Anyway, this isn't a blocker as the baseurl (and safeurl) are used only for error
reporting.