[0/1] Fix netrc usage with WebDAV-based HTTP protocol

Message

brian m. carlson Feb. 23, 2025, 1:53 a.m. UTC

For a long time, we've enabled the automatic usage of netrc if the user
doesn't provide any credentials.  Unfortunately, in 2.46, this broke for
the WebDAV-based HTTP protocol, which this series fixes.

In looking at this issue, I discovered that we have (before this series)
zero tests for the netrc functionality and zero documentation for it,
which obviously is suboptimal.  In this series, I am adding one test,
which is for this particular bug.

However, I think we need to either decide that we're going to support
this as a fully-fledged feature and add documentation and sufficient
tests, or remove it, since it's not reasonable to have undocumented,
untested features that people rely on.  Our HTTP code is quite subtle
and complex and we can't expect future developers not to break things in
this state[0].  I will note, as an argument in favour of removal, that
we have git-credential-netrc helper in contrib that users can enable if
they want to retain this functionality, and we could even ship it by
default without much difficulty.  For those reasons, I am not planning
to add more tests and documentation here, but of course I welcome
interested parties to do so.

[0] Personally, I had some vague knowledge this feature existed and I
feel like I'm reasonably familiar with the HTTP code, and I still
accidentally introduced a bug, so that doesn't bode well for
contributors who are less familiar with it.

brian m. carlson (1):
  http: allow using netrc for WebDAV-based HTTP protocol

 http.c                      |  3 +--
 t/t5540-http-push-webdav.sh | 10 ++++++++++
 2 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)