Function will check given url and try to verify if it's a valid

        link. Sometimes it may happened that mercurial will issue basic

        auth request that can cause whole API to hang when used from python

        or other external calls.

        On failures it'll raise urllib2.HTTPError, exception is also thrown

        when the return code is non 200

        """

        # check first if it's not an local url

        if os.path.isdir(url) or url.startswith('file:'):

            return True

        if '+' in url[:url.find('://')]:

        handlers = []

        url_obj = hg_url(url)

        test_uri, authinfo = url_obj.authinfo()

        url_obj.passwd = '*****'

        cleaned_uri = str(url_obj)

        if authinfo:

            #create a password manager

            passmgr = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()

            passmgr.add_password(*authinfo)

        qs = '?%s' % urllib.urlencode(q)

        cu = "%s%s" % (test_uri, qs)

        req = urllib2.Request(cu, None, {})

        try:

            resp = o.open(req)

            if resp.code != 200:

                raise Exception('Return Code is not 200')

        except Exception, e:

            # means it cannot be cloned

            raise urllib2.URLError("[%s] org_exc: %s" % (cleaned_uri, e))

        return True

    def _get_repo(self, create, src_url=None, update_after_clone=False):

        """

        Function will check for mercurial repository in given path and return

        a localrepo object. If there is no repository in that path it will

        raise an exception unless ``create`` parameter is set to True - in

        that case repository would be created and returned.

        If ``src_url`` is given, would try to clone repository from the

        location at given clone_point. Additionally it'll make update to

        working copy accordingly to ``update_after_clone`` flag