"cargo clone" to check out a crate's repo

[joshtriplett]

I'd love to write something like "cargo clone byteorder" to clone a copy of the corresponding git repository.

[emberian]

Cargo packages don't necessarily have a corresponding git (or any other) repository. The repository metadata doesn't even include the VCS right now.

[joshtriplett]

They frequently do, though, and crates.io displays it.

[emberian]

That's an arbitrary string, it doesn't even need to be a URL.

[alexcrichton]

cc @larsbergstrom @SimonSapin

Sounds like you Servo guys would definitely like this for when you're doing a Rust upgrade and upgrading all of your crates. The workflow Lars and I just talked about in theory looks like:

• cargo clone inside the Servo repo to check out a new crate outside the Servo repo, setup a path override, and get the dep ready for editing
• Edit the cloned out dep, push upstream
• Remove the clone, override, and update the dependency all in one go

This may be good to be an external subcommand to start out, but cargo clone may be nice to have as an official subcommand!

As a side note, cargo clone on a git repo can also leverage Cargo's own cache of the git repo for the initial clone to reduce a lot of network traffic.

[davidzchen]

@JanLikar is working on this feature in #1861

[JanLikar]

It's not yet feature complete, but you might find it useful. https://github.com/JanLikar/cargo-clone

[davidzchen]

Is the plan still to merge cargo-clone into cargo?

[alexcrichton]

@davidzchen certainly yeah! We're always open to folding in new subcommands that have clearly proven themselves. For example that's sort of what we did with cargo check!

[fa7ca7]

Is this still relevant and nobody is going to tackle this?

[matklad]

@dethoter yep, this is still relevant!

[fa7ca7]

Thank you. I'm on it

[ehuss]

@joshtriplett I made a little command to clone a package: https://github.com/ehuss/cargo-clone-crate

It does some heuristics to guess which VCS to use, but since most people use github or gitlab, it normally is correct. It even checks whether it is git or hg for bitbucket. 😄

[dwijnand]

Nowadays this probably requires an RFC to land in cargo proper.