Re: [PATCH] Prompt for a username when an HTTP request 401s

Daniel Stenberg [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, 19 Mar 2010, Tay Ray Chuan wrote:

quoted

quoted

When an HTTP request returns a 401, Git will currently fail with a  
confusing message saying that it got a 401.

how are you getting 401s? Recently, git set the CURL_AUTH_ANY option, 
so if the correct credentials are passed, curl should have "hid" the 
401 from us.

That's correct. It should hide the 401 in the sense that it should try to 
continue and do the correct authentication procedure and only if that 
fails it should end up with an actual 401 end result.

If the URL didn't contain a username, and the server returns a 401,
Git just aborts with an error.

What Scott is trying to do here is teach Git to request a
username/password if there was no username in the URL and
authentication is required by the server.

In the case of GitHub, this means they can advertise one http:// URL
for the repository.  Anonymous fetch just works, and using that same
URL to push will ask for your username/password, and then complete.

-- 
Shawn.