tree 6f4ce8d746e2b2898366b8971d13073a25e86a52
parent 88097030725bf68d1801559cfb4785b93a50f5f8
author Jeff King <peff@peff.net> 1346074035 -0400
committer Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> 1346089749 -0700

http: prompt for credentials on failed POST

All of the smart-http GET requests go through the http_get_*
functions, which will prompt for credentials and retry if we
see an HTTP 401.

POST requests, however, do not go through any central point.
Moreover, it is difficult to retry in the general case; we
cannot assume the request body fits in memory or is even
seekable, and we don't know how much of it was consumed
during the attempt.

Most of the time, this is not a big deal; for both fetching
and pushing, we make a GET request before doing any POSTs,
so typically we figure out the credentials during the first
request, then reuse them during the POST. However, some
servers may allow a client to get the list of refs from
receive-pack without authentication, and then require
authentication when the client actually tries to POST the
pack.

This is not ideal, as the client may do a non-trivial amount
of work to generate the pack (e.g., delta-compressing
objects). However, for a long time it has been the
recommended example configuration in git-http-backend(1) for
setting up a repository with anonymous fetch and
authenticated push. This setup has always been broken
without putting a username into the URL. Prior to commit
986bbc0, it did work with a username in the URL, because git
would prompt for credentials before making any requests at
all. However, post-986bbc0, it is totally broken. Since it
has been advertised in the manpage for some time, we should
make sure it works.

Unfortunately, it is not as easy as simply calling post_rpc
again when it fails, due to the input issue mentioned above.
However, we can still make this specific case work by
retrying in two specific instances:

  1. If the request is large (bigger than LARGE_PACKET_MAX),
     we will first send a probe request with a single flush
     packet. Since this request is static, we can freely
     retry it.

  2. If the request is small and we are not using gzip, then
     we have the whole thing in-core, and we can freely
     retry.

That means we will not retry in some instances, including:

  1. If we are using gzip. However, we only do so when
     calling git-upload-pack, so it does not apply to
     pushes.

  2. If we have a large request, the probe succeeds, but
     then the real POST wants authentication. This is an
     extremely unlikely configuration and not worth worrying
     about.

While it might be nice to cover those instances, doing so
would be significantly more complex for very little
real-world gain. In the long run, we will be much better off
when curl learns to internally handle authentication as a
callback, and we can cleanly handle all cases that way.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>