Revision b81401c1de0e0fec39f8643ce7a794fda083f7a1 authored by Jeff King on 27 August 2012, 13:27:15 UTC, committed by Junio C Hamano on 27 August 2012, 17:49:09 UTC
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>
1 parent 8809703
Raw File
walker.h
#ifndef WALKER_H
#define WALKER_H

#include "remote.h"

struct walker {
	void *data;
	int (*fetch_ref)(struct walker *, struct ref *ref);
	void (*prefetch)(struct walker *, unsigned char *sha1);
	int (*fetch)(struct walker *, unsigned char *sha1);
	void (*cleanup)(struct walker *);
	int get_tree;
	int get_history;
	int get_all;
	int get_verbosely;
	int get_recover;

	int corrupt_object_found;
};

/* Report what we got under get_verbosely */
void walker_say(struct walker *walker, const char *, const char *);

/* Load pull targets from stdin */
int walker_targets_stdin(char ***target, const char ***write_ref);

/* Free up loaded targets */
void walker_targets_free(int targets, char **target, const char **write_ref);

/* If write_ref is set, the ref filename to write the target value to. */
/* If write_ref_log_details is set, additional text will appear in the ref log. */
int walker_fetch(struct walker *impl, int targets, char **target,
		 const char **write_ref, const char *write_ref_log_details);

void walker_free(struct walker *walker);

struct walker *get_http_walker(const char *url);

#endif /* WALKER_H */
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