Is there a defined open protocol for distributed version control?

In the wake of Microsoft&#x27;s acquisition of GitHub I briefly entertained the thought of writing my own GitHub replacement, at which point I realized for the first time that the concept of a Pull Request is a GitHub thing, not a Git thing. Also at the same time we&#x27;re having a discussion at work about migrating from TFS to Git. And I&#x27;ve always liked Mercurial best for my own development... Which leads me to ask:<p>1. Is there a protocol specification for source control (like OStatus or ActivityPub but for communicating with a source control server)?<p>2. If not, can we create one with a name like Open Version Control (OVC for short)?<p>3. Can we then agree on what constitutes the necessary data for a commit, push, user info, etc (so we can make Linus happy[1]) so plugins&#x2F;extension can be made for Git, Mercurial, TFS, VSTS, SVN, etc such that I can use Mercurial for my local workflow and then use a command like `hg ovc push GitLab&#x2F;FeatureFoo` and my local Mercurial repo pushes the state of my branch to the FeatureFoo branch on the GitLab remote I&#x27;ve defined (and the fact that GitLab is running Git and not Hg would be irrelevant).<p>At that point I couldn&#x27;t care less how the hosting provider works internally; it also means an OVC-compliant host could give you the repo in any supported format you could want for local use (Hg for me; Git for Linux; VSS for Steve Ballmer, etc).<p>Would this be a useful development or would work on such a project be a waste of time?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;torvalds-github&#x2F;