Re: [PATCH] ci: work around Debian 12's HTTP/2 authentication failures

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Jeff,

On Wed, 23 Sep 2026, Jeff King wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 10:17:05AM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> 
> > Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> > 
> > > +# Curl 7.88.1 can fail to retry authentication after an early HTTP/2
> > > +# response. This was fixed in curl 8.3.0; see
> > > +# https://github.com/curl/curl/pull/11756. The first affected version is
> > > +# unknown, so conservatively assume that versions from 7.88.1 up to (but
> > > +# not including) 8.3.0 are broken.
> > 
> > Just nitpicking the wording, but if the first affected version is
> > truly unknown, assuming that versions from 7.88.1 up is *not* a
> > conservative thing to do at all, is it?
> > 
> > If 7.88.1 is from an irrelevantly ancient past, I would say that we
> > should just skip anything older than 8.3.0, but 7.88.1 is from early
> > 2023 and we cannot do such a simplification.
> 
> It depends on what bad outcome we are being conservative against. If the
> bad outcome is skipping the test on a version for which we could
> reliably use it, then it is conservative to only select known-bad
> versions. If the bad outcome is somebody running the test and seeing a
> flaky fail, then yes, the more conservative thing would be extending to
> skip older unknown versions (potentially up to "forever").
> 
> I think you could argue either way (and I am OK with either, or even
> just matching 7.88.1).

I had GPT-6 dig deeper into the issue, since you're right: This should not
be a CI/Debian-only gate, at the same time I didn't know what was the
first version with the bug, so I suspected the version range to be subtly
inaccurate. Turns out that the bug appeared first in cURL v7.88.0. So I
adjusted your version range in preparation for the next patch iteration.

Thank you!
Johannes