I wrote this nearly a year ago, and it's recently been broken by the new
redirect that Google Code does. A few dozen apps were fixed thanks to
this, so it did its job.
If any devs still on Google Code after all this time want to update
their metadata, they can.
This avoids calling rewritemeta separately, which means parsing all the
metadata files once instead of twice.
This reduces the running time of the pre-commit script from ~3s to ~2s
on my machine.
Calling it only once means that files are read and written only once too.
Total time it takes to run it on the actual fdroiddata dropped from ~25sec to
~6sec.
For git repos, using https:// reduces metadata leakage for more privacy,
and increases the security a little bit. For SVN repos, using https:// is
much more important since the repo format itself does not provide the same
level of verification as git, hg, etc. do.