credential helpers (was: What's cooking in git.git (Aug 2011, #07; Wed, 24))

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:22:49 -0700 Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote: 

JCH> We need to add "auth-domain" support, perhaps from the command line option
JCH> and configuration, if we ever need to support such a site.

JCH> We can consider what you already have as the default case for a more
JCH> general "we cut off at the hostname and take that as the auth-domain
JCH> boundary unless told otherwise". We may not have the way to "tell
JCH> otherwise" yet, but as long as we are reasonably confident that we know
JCH> how to extend the system in a backward compatible way, it is not a
JCH> show-stopper.

How about a config variable with regular expressions like

auth-domain.xyz.url = https://(.*@)?github.com/.*

so then accessing a remote with that URL with or without a username
would pass "auth-domain=xyz" to the helper?  If there's no defined
auth-domain then it's not passed to the helper, so it has to just use
the host name (if there is an auth-domain the helper gets it PLUS the
hostname, of course).  

I specify the "url" sub-key so we can add more auth-domain selection
criteria or other functionality in the future.

That gives the user a way to do, for instance:

auth-domain.internalcompany.url = https://.*.mycompany.com/.*

I also wanted to suggest that the credential helper should be able to
specify a SSL private user key and the passphrase for it for HTTPS
connections to servers that require such keys.

JCH> The primary reason why I wanted to hold this topic off was because of the
JCH> frequency of bug report we saw this round to topics _after_ they hit the
JCH> "master" branch, indicating that not many people are testing "next" during
JCH> the development cycle as they used to in olden days.

I'll be sure to test credential helpers next week.

Thank you
Ted