Re: why multiple password prompts?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 29, 2008, 22:11 UTC
Message-ID: <20080329221156.GE30851@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20080329220543.GD30851@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 06:05:43PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> > That's cool - didn't know a rework of the ssh interactions had
> > happened. It would be really good if we could detect if there's an
> > existing "master" connection and piggyback over that (see options -M
> > and -O). Reading man ssh_config it looks like we may be able to say
> > something along the lines of " -o ControlMaster=auto ".
> 
> I have been using this for at least a year with git; just put
> "ControlMaster auto" into your .ssh/config.

Oh, and if you are trying to achieve "doing two back-to-back ssh's should only need one connection because of ControlMaster", that doesn't work.

The master is closely tied to the first session, so it exits when that session finishes.

I think more useful semantics for something like git would be an opportunistic short-lived server. That is, 'ssh foo' would try:

  - if .ssh/cache/foo does not exist, spawn "master"
  - repeatedly try to connect via .ssh/cache/foo (since it
    may take a while for the connection to be made, but
    eventually time out if we can't do it)

The "master" would:
  - listen on .ssh/cache/foo
  - connect to 'foo' via ssh
  - multiplex any incoming connections on .ssh/cache/foo on our session
  - after N seconds of no active connections, close the ssh session

But that is an ssh problem, not a git problem at all.

-Peff