Re: Disabling credential helper?

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Dec 4, 2014, 00:42 UTC
Message-ID: <20141204004231.GA200195@vauxhall.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <20141203012148.GB29427@peff.net>

On Tue, Dec 02, 2014 at 08:21:48PM -0500, Jeff King wrote:

> We could teach the credential-helper code to do that (e.g., a helper
> returns "stop=true" and we respect that). But I think you can do it
> reasonably well today by making the input process fail. Sadly setting
> GIT_ASKPASS to "false" just makes git complain and then try harder[1].

Yes, I did notice that. I tried /bin/false at first, and was a bit surprised it wasn't effective.

> But you can dissociate git from the terminal, like:
> 
>   $ setsid -w git ls-remote https://github.com/private/repo
>   fatal: could not read Username for 'https://github.com': No such device or address

I think this is a bit heavy-handed for my needs. At work, we develop on headless VMs, so we use SSH for pushing since we can forward the agent. At home, I use Kerberos, so the prompt generally indicates I need to run kinit.

In neither case do I actually want to enter a password, so the environment variable will work fine, I think, since it sounds like it's at least semi-supported and it works well in scripts and in configuration files.

Also, having to patch the Perl git wrappers to use setsid would be more inconvenience than it's worth.

> That might have other fallouts if you use process groups for anything. I
> have no problem with either an option to disable the terminal prompting,
> or teaching the credential-helper interface to allow helpers to stop
> lookup, either of which would be cleaner.

I'll probably submit a patch to disable the terminal prompting this weekend.

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
+1 832 623 2791 | http://www.crustytoothpaste.net/~bmc | My opinion only
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