Tip: Mercurial atop ssh

On opensolaris.org, we host Mercurial and Subversion via their ability to tunnel through an SSH connection. A slight gotcha with Mercurial is that it turns off compression when tunnelled through SSH, as described in hg(1):

$ man hg
....
- Mercurial doesn't use its own compression via SSH; the right thing
to do is to configure it in your ~/.ssh/ssh_config, e.g.:
Host *.mylocalnetwork.example.com
Compression off
Host *
Compression on
Alternatively specify "ssh -C" as your ssh command in your hgrc or
with the --ssh command line option.
....

For pulls of a large repository, such as ON, compression changes an approximately 51 minute operation to a 17 minute operation. So you’ll want something like

$ cat ~/.ssh/config
....
Host hg.opensolaris.org
Compression yes
...
....

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris Mercurial hg ]