Peeking at the code of the upcoming Capistrano 2, I noticed you can define different scm variables for remote and local use, which is something I need (I was looking at the code in the hope it could do this :)
So, say I have my code stored in a subversion repository on my local disk, say file:///project/trunk. That’s fine for when Capistrano is querying the latest revision, but the remote servers need to use the repository url svn+ssh://mymachine/project/trunk.
Without modifying the code, this was impossible with Capistrano v1. With Capistrano v2, you can prefix any scm configuration variable with local_ and it will be used for local operations:
set :repository, "svn+ssh://mymachine/project/trunk"
set :local_repository, "file:///project/trunk"