Among a lot of other things you can add names for remote repositories to your mercurial.ini so you can access them without having to type that long path. This can be quite convenient e.g.
[path] dzlib=ssh://twm@hg.code.sf.net/p/dzlib/hgdzmaincode
allows me to clone a copy of my dzlib+tools main repository on sourceforge like this:
hg clone dzlib dzlib+tools
rather than having to type:
hg clone ssh://twm@hg.code.sf.net/p/dzlib/hgdzmaincode dzlib+tools
Unfortunately this also tends to add the possibility for undesired side effects. Consider this:
hg clone dzlib dzlib
What is it supposed to do? What I wanted it to do, is simple: Clone the remote repository dzlib (as configured in the [path] section) to the subdirectory dzlib.
What it actually tries to do is: Clone the remote repository dzlib to the remote repository dzlib, which is definitely not what I wanted it to do.
Since I rarely create new clones from the remote repository I have removed the entries in [path] again, because the time potentially spent on troubleshooting these side effects is much longer than having to look up the remote url the few times I actually want to clone a remote repository.