By default, we tell curl to use CURLAUTH_ANY, which does not
limit its set of auth methods. However, this results in an
extra round-trip to the server when authentication is
required. After we've fed the credential to curl, it wants
to probe the server to find its list of available methods
before sending an Authorization header.
We can shortcut this by limiting our http_auth_methods by
what the server told us it supports. In some cases (such as
when the server only supports Basic), that lets curl skip
the extra probe request.
The end result should look the same to the user, but you can
use GIT_TRACE_CURL to verify the sequence of requests:
Before this patch, hitting a Basic-only server like
github.com results in:
Send header: GET /repo.git/info/refs?service=git-upload-pack HTTP/1.1
Recv header: HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Send header: GET /repo.git/info/refs?service=git-upload-pack HTTP/1.1
Recv header: HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Send header: GET /repo.git/info/refs?service=git-upload-pack HTTP/1.1
Send header: Authorization: Basic <redacted>
Recv header: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
And after:
Send header: GET /repo.git/info/refs?service=git-upload-pack HTTP/1.1
Recv header: HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Send header: GET /repo.git/info/refs?service=git-upload-pack HTTP/1.1
Send header: Authorization: Basic <redacted>
Recv header: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
The possible downsides are:
- This only helps for a Basic-only server; for a server
with multiple auth options, curl may still send a probe
request to see which ones are available (IOW, there's no
way to say "don't probe, I already know what the server
will say").
- The http_auth_methods variable is global, so this will
apply to all further requests. That's acceptable for
Git's usage of curl, though, which also treats the
credentials as global. I.e., in any given program
invocation we hit only one conceptual server (we may be
redirected at the outset, but in that case that's whose
auth_avail field we'd see).
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>