git with https and client cert asks for password repeatedly

First off, I am fairly new to git, so let me apologize in advance if I suggest anything stupid.

When fetching or pushing over https:// with a client certificate (http.sslCert / http.sslKey), git asks for a password for every single requested file. For example, here I push three commits with a couple changed files each:

Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Fetching remote heads...
  refs/
  refs/tags/
  refs/heads/
updating 'refs/heads/master'
  from 1df865db590b4a7d4991c13053437ac90b2780e4
  to   05e856a6a5ce9b05a5a7d10cb5d10010467eea72
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
    sending 12 objects
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Enter PEM pass phrase:
    done
Updating remote server info

To make matters worse, when you try to CTRL-C from the "Enter PEM pass phrase" prompt, it just re-prompts you! If you want to see this in action, set up a webdav server on https://localhost with a copy of git.git and try cloning it with a password-protected client certificate.

This problem makes client-side certificates unusable with git. A possible workaround is to leave the key unencrypted, but this is usually unacceptable for security reasons. Ideally, I would just type my password once per invocation and git would remember it. (This is how svn works.)

I think the root problem is that git creates a completely new http(s) connection for every request, rather than using one persistent connection. Using a persistent connection would theoretically speed up the transfers, in addition to fixing the password prompt issue. I'm pretty sure that calling `curl_easy_cleanup()' after every request is causing this behavior; I don't think this is necessary.

I tried fixing this myself, but the http/curl code is pretty
confusing.  Just wondering - why is HTTP_MULTI required for http-push?
 I saw a thread from Jan '08 about this, but it never said *why*
HTTP_MULTI is required, only that the push doesn't work without it.
It doesn't appear to me that git uses concurrent connections in any
useful way, so I don't know why having a single connection would not
work.

Finally, is there interest in refactoring the http code to make it a little cleaner? That is, make a wrapper library around curl so that you can just call GET or POST or whatever and not worry about how to invoke curl?

-- Mark Lodato