Redmine

I'm trying to setup a nice clean mercurial/redmine based dev environment. I want to allow checkouts and commits to the mercurial repos via http.

I want people to be able to use the same usernames and passwords they use in redmine for the mercurial login. Especially I want them to be able to change there password via redmine and have that propigate to the mercurial repo users. I'm fine with there being a little delay so a periodic sync would be fine.

Has anyone done this? Is there a standard way?

I've had one idea so far (just to make my goals clear, I don't really like this method): Write a script that converts the redmine users table in the DB to a htpasswd file for apache and then have that run every few minutes.

Also I'm looking for a way to easily edit the "allow_push" property in the .hg/hgrc for the repos. Has anyone setup any tools for that? This is easier than the above because the users don't need to do it only the administrators. However it would rock if this too could be pulled out of the redmine database somehow.

Thanks a lot.
-Arthur