Torsten Bögershausen [off-list ref] writes:
It is easy to strip the foo:: part of the url, assume that
the remote helper uses a RFC 3986 similar url syntax, so that we
can feed the reminding https://host/repo.git into the parser (see above).
The thing that worries me is that foo:: syntax and external helper
interface was invented by Daniel Barkalow primarily because he
wanted to allow things that do *not* fit in that URL-like scheme,
for example see:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/125374/focus=125405
If the remote helper doesn't do this, we can't guess anything, can we ?
So error out and tell the user seems the right thing to do.
Yes. A blind guess that fails spectacularly is far worse than an
outright rejection that is cautious.