Re: [PATCH 2/2] Revert "remote-curl: fall back to basic auth if Negotiate fails"

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: May 19, 2021, 13:58 UTC
Message-ID: <43035278-5742-607a-57bd-971685deece8@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <YKNeXq3JzxYWkxKl@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On 5/18/2021 2:27 AM, Jeff King wrote:

Show 19 quoted lines

> This reverts commit 1b0d9545bb85912a16b367229d414f55d140d3be.
> 
> That commit does fix the situation it intended to (avoiding Negotiate
> even when the credentials were provided in the URL), but it creates a
> more serious regression: we now never hit the conditional for "we had a
> username and password, tried them, but the server still gave us a 401".
> That has two bad effects:
> 
>  1. we never call credential_reject(), and thus a bogus credential
>     stored by a helper will live on forever
> 
>  2. we never return HTTP_NOAUTH, so the error message the user gets is
>     "The requested URL returned error: 401", instead of "Authentication
>     failed".
> 
> Doing this correctly seems non-trivial, as we don't know whether the
> Negotiate auth was a problem. Since this is a regression in the upcoming
> v2.23.0 release (for which we're in -rc0), let's revert for now and work
> on a fix separately.

I think the revert is sufficiently justified here.

> (Note that this isn't a pure revert; the previous commit added a test
> showing the regression, so we can now flip it to expect_success).

Keeping the test is excellent, because it gives us a way to confirm that a second attempt at a fix is at least as good as the first.

The only thing that could improve this situation is to add a test that checks the bug that the previous version introduced, so that the next round doesn't repeat the mistake. That can be deferred because it is more important that we get this fix in time for the next release candidate.

Thanks, -Stolee