http:// transport should transparently check for smart server and use it if present

It would be really cool if doing a bzr clone http://www.example.com/bzr/project/branch would check to see if the the smart server is present (ie via mod_python and mod_rewrite) and if so, use it transparently.

I realize that this means one or two extra requests, the POST to .bzr/smart or whatever. Checking out my project via http:// takes 22 minutes due to the 600-odd round trips necessary to fetch the knits (sic) one by one. I would respectfully suggest that the cost of two additional round trips for benefit of potentially locating an active smart server and subsequent firehose return of a single on-the-spot pack (sic) thereby reducing initial checkout time to the order of 1.5 minutes would be two round trips well invested.

As of bzr 0.18 the client does not do this even though people in #bzr seemed to expect that it would. Given the proliferation of http:// as the URL publicly advertised via a project's website (or even more importantly, previously used and now cached as the remembered branch URL), using the smart server transparently seems like a worthy thing to do.

AfC