In Git, there appears to be no way to send a message which will be output by git clone http://..., although the response code is visible. We send the message in a header which is visible with "GIT_CURL_VERBOSE" if you know where to look.

In Mercurial, the HTTP status response message is printed to the console, so we send human-readable text there.

In Subversion, we can get it to print a custom message if we send an invalid/unknown response code, although the output is ugly and difficult to read. For known codes like 404, it prints a canned message.

All VCS binaries ignore the response body; we include it only for completeness.