Re: The imporantance of including http credential caching in 1.7.7

> On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 11:02:11AM -0400, John Szakmeister wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Michael J Gruber
>> <git@drmicha.warpmail.net> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> It would be interesting to know what we can rely on in the user group
>>> you're thinking about (which I called ssh-challenged). Setting up ssh
>>> keys is too complicated. Can we require a working gpg setup? They do
>>> want to check sigs, don't they?
>>
>> I don't think you can require a working gpg setup (at least for not
>> addressing the ssh-challenged group).
> 
> Agreed. Anything harder than ssh keys is right out the window, because
> they're always the alternative these people could be using (but can't or
> don't want to).

> We could make our own gpg-based password wallet system, but I think it's
> a really bad idea, for two reasons:
> 
>   1. It's reinventing the wheel. Which is bad enough as it is, but is
>      doubly bad with security-related code, because it's very easy to
>      screw something up when you're writing a lot of new code.

>   2. It's inconvenient for users. Nobody wants a separate wallet system
>      with its own master password. They want to integrate with the
>      wallet system they're already using. Which is generally going to be
>      way nicer _anyway_, because it's going to be part of the OS and do
>      helpful things like unlock the secret store using their login
>      credentials.

>>> So: What credential store/password wallet/etc. can we rely on for this
>>> group? Is gpg fair game?
>>
>> I think there probably need to be providers for using Keychain under
>> the Mac, gnome-keyring and kwallet under Linux, and probably something
>> using the wincrypt API under Windows.  I don't think there's a
>> one-store-fits-all solution here, unfortunately. :-(
> 
> Exactly. That's why the helpers communicate via pipes. They don't have
> to be included with core git at all; you should be able to just drop a
> third-party git-credential-foo into your PATH.
> 
>> I'm actually tempted try and work on a couple of those myself.
> 
> Please do! I mentioned a few people working on helpers elsewhere in this
> thread, so you may want to see what they've done and/or coordinate to
> avoid duplicate effort. Let me know if you have trouble finding the
> appropriate threads in the list archive.