Re: [PATCH] Prompt for a username when an HTTP request 401s

From: Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 1, 2010, 22:06 UTC
Message-ID: <h2vd411cc4a1004011506p4d2db46bjafbe22f702b0f869@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7v39zeoo70.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Hey,

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 2:30 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>
> Also, earlier I said "sometimes OK", because I don't know if it always OK
> for us to get 401 and continue.  If the end user got a 401 and then does
> not have a good username or password (e.g. he realizes that the URL he
> accessed was incorrect), he used to see "you are not allowed to access
> this repository" with a clean failure, but now he would have to get out of
> "who are you?" interaction (and how would he do that?).  Would that be a
> problem?

They did not get a clean failure, it looks like this:

-- $ git clone http://github.dev/defunkt/ambition.git Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/svn/ambition/.git/ error: The requested URL returned error: 401 while accessing http://github.dev/defunkt/ambition.git/info/refs

fatal: HTTP request failed --

"401 while accessing X, HTTP request failed" is not really a clean failure. Most people don't know what a 401 is. With this patch, if they get prompted for a user/pass on 401 and it still fails, they see this:

-- $ ~/bin/git clone http://github.dev/defunkt/ambition.git Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/svn/ambition/.git/ Username: Password: fatal: Authentication failed --

I think "Authentication failed" is a bit cleaner. I'm sending another patch with the comment format change and message update.

Scott