git no longer prompting for password

[Iain Paton <ipaton0@gmail.com>]

Hi List,

A recent update to git 1.7.12 from 1.7.3.5 seems to have changed something - trying to push to a smart http backend no longer prompts for a password and hence fails the server auth.

The server is currently running git 1.7.9 behind apache 2.4.3 with an almost verbatim copy of the apache config from the git-http-backend manpage.

Backtracking through the versions I've skipped and this doesn't seem to be a new problem, client side up to 1.7.7.7 works, 1.7.8 onwards don't. Server side version doesn't seem to make a difference.

user@fubar01:~/test# git --version
git version 1.7.7.7
user@fubar01:~/test# git push http://ipaton@10.0.0.1/git/test.git master
Password: 

type the password in and the push is successful

user@fubar01:~/test# git --version
git version 1.7.8
user@fubar01:~/test# git push http://ipaton@10.0.0.1/git/test.git master --verbose
Pushing to http://ipaton@10.0.0.1/git/test.git
Counting objects: 6, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (5/5), 491 bytes, done.
Total 5 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
error: RPC failed; result=22, HTTP code = 401
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Watching the connection with wireshark shows that it does appear to try to authenticate with the correct username, but without a password. Not surprising since it doesn't ask for one..

googling for git and password just seems to give results where people want it to stop asking for a password, which is the oppsite of what I want!  
Looking at changelogs for 1.7.8 and I'm not really seeing anything that says I need to do something different.

Any help or pointers appreciated.

Thanks,
Iain