I posted a JIRA about this, but perhaps the mailing list is more appropriate.
I don't understand why the HG plugin requires absolute URLs unless you explicitly ask it to 'push' or 'pull'. If you are just doing checkins and the like, the file system pathname defines the entire situation. This is particularly important insofar as I'd like do to this stuff in an arbitrary clone which has only a local file: URL, so checking the URL in is pretty silly.
