I would love to have some kind of protocol standardized for this. Having done some work on build/packaging tooling for the ROS ecosystem, there are a bunch of cases where we we need to access a metadata file (for dependency resolution) or grab a tarball from a remote repo and end up having to have multiple implementations to handle the slight differences between Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket, plus a fallback option that actually does a local clone, see:
I have hit similar problems multiple times in the past. So I'd be happy if there was a standard git server that is worth its name. SVN did that part right by using WebDAV, so any HTTP client is enough to grab a the contents of a file from there. It is a shame that git doesn't have anything sinilar out of the box almost 20 years later. Even hg has an embedded http that can provide this.
https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosdistro/tree/master/...
https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosinstall_generator/b...