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Git password authentication is shutting down

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31–40 of 353 posts

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#31

I'm fine with this change for my usage, I don't think I've used password auth for myself or any automated service I've setup for years now. However, this will introduce more confusion for newcomers who already have to figure out what Git, GitHub, etc are. I just spent some time last weeekend teaching someone the basics of how to create a new project. Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic termina…

Are you teaching a junior at work? What's the context?

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#32
post #31

I'm fine with this change for my usage, I don't think I've used password auth for myself or any automated service I've setup for years now. However, this will introduce more confusion for newcomers who already have to figure out what Git, GitHub, etc are. I just spent some time last weeekend teaching someone the basics of how to create a new project. Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic termina…

Are you teaching a junior at work? What's the context?

In this case it is a younger college student who's interested in web development but hasn't done any CS learning and isn't generally familiar with tech.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#33

I'm fine with this change for my usage, I don't think I've used password auth for myself or any automated service I've setup for years now. However, this will introduce more confusion for newcomers who already have to figure out what Git, GitHub, etc are. I just spent some time last weeekend teaching someone the basics of how to create a new project. Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic termina…

Is there a reason one of the many git tutorials online wasn't good enough? https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/set-up-git https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials This one's always fun: https://learngitbranching.js.org/ https://www.tutorialspoint.com/git/index.htm

We're taking a 1:1 approach, but most of the time I take issue with the language used in many guides. The linked guides are good examples, they contain a whole load of terms and buzzwords you don't need to know as a beginner.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah .. it's not great. Creating a machine user is really the only way to do it right now :(.

And they'll charge you the full seat price for it :/

GitLab now has project access tokens for that.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#35
Disclosure: I'm the Git Systems PM at GitHub. Opinions are my own and I wasn't directly involved with this effort.

GCM Core is a really straightforward way to auth with GitHub and several other Git hosts. It comes with Git for Windows by default, can be installed with `brew` on macOS, and from a .deb on Linux. https://github.com/microsoft/Git-Credential-Manager-Core (it started under the Microsoft banner but is maintained by GitHub employees now).

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#36

I'm fine with this change for my usage, I don't think I've used password auth for myself or any automated service I've setup for years now. However, this will introduce more confusion for newcomers who already have to figure out what Git, GitHub, etc are. I just spent some time last weeekend teaching someone the basics of how to create a new project. Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic termina…

Is there a reason one of the many git tutorials online wasn't good enough? https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/set-up-git https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials This one's always fun: https://learngitbranching.js.org/ https://www.tutorialspoint.com/git/index.htm

Let's look at the tutorial for caching git credentials, which is referenced in your first link: (https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/getting-started-with-...).

It walks you through installing a "cask" using "brew". It doesn't mention how to install homebrew but instead directs you to the homebrew homepage which shows the output of a curl command being fed to `bash -c`. Something that's both bad practice and unintelligible unless you're quite familiar with Unix shells. If everything works as intended, you're good to go! But if anything goes wrong, or you have to update the "cask" in the future you're left with little to no context about what you just did.

For someone unfamiliar with Unix shell commands, homebrew, curl, etc. this is a quagmire that can take days to unravel without someone there to help them.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#37
post #7

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish

Passwords are probably one of the worst things to happen to our field as a whole (phishing, password managers, etc. are the results of their ubiquity), so efforts to remove them are probably not part of some Microsoft plan to kill open source. This change is a good thing.

Indeed. I wish there was something like a token or key that was as ubiquitous as passwords.

Though from a developer POV I can certainly see why passwords are so attractive: take a word, hash it, compare hash on subsequent logins.

The alternatives are tricky, but not I suspect impossible, to do in a decentralised manner. I've often pondered that something like PGP servers with revocation certificates, but adapted to logins would be near the realm of a solution.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#38

I'm fine with this change for my usage, I don't think I've used password auth for myself or any automated service I've setup for years now. However, this will introduce more confusion for newcomers who already have to figure out what Git, GitHub, etc are. I just spent some time last weeekend teaching someone the basics of how to create a new project. Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic termina…

VSCode has come a long way in making this easier for newcomers. The Remote repositories extension basically will open up a link in Github to generate the Personal Authentication token to associate with your VSCode app and that's it.

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/06/10/remote-reposi...

Combined with things like Codespaces, I can see a lot of intro classes glossing over some of what's happening under the hood.

That said, I really do think that skills like learning how to use a terminal and work through the CLI are necessary for developers to grow. It's not so different from how woodworkers don't just learn how to use a chisel, but also how to sharpen and bevel the tool as well.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#39

I'm fine with this change for my usage, I don't think I've used password auth for myself or any automated service I've setup for years now. However, this will introduce more confusion for newcomers who already have to figure out what Git, GitHub, etc are. I just spent some time last weeekend teaching someone the basics of how to create a new project. Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic termina…

I also have found teaching someone how to be even marginally capable of contributing to a Github project from scratch to be a very time consuming and frustrating thing. Think, having your graphics designer able to make commits, or having someone who only wants to update docs.

The worst part is the "easier" solutions are actually just footguns in disguise, as soon as they accidentally click the wrong thing and end up with a detached HEAD, a few commits ahead and behind the REMOTE, and halfway through a botched merge, you have to figure out how to bail them out of that using a GUI you've never actually used. Knowing all this, you either teach them git (high short term pain, high chance of them just giving up immediately) or you tell them to download the first result for "windows foss git gui" and pray that history won't repeat itself.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#40

When will we get repo-specific tokens? That's what I really want. As-is, I've just created extra special purpose github accounts, but that's a bad solution IMO.

I'm guessing that if that's gonna happen (cmon, it's gotta) they view this migration is a pre-requisite
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