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Git password authentication is shutting down

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241–250 of 353 posts

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#241

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…

> "Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic terminal commands, GitHub, git and its most common commands. It took about 3 hours for us to get through just the most basic pieces." I don't get this. "Can you imagine? Learning to program a computer took us some hours!" What do you expect? That people without prior knowledge or experience just pick up source control in seconds? I'm honestly wondering -…

You're right. A subject being difficult to master means we should do everything we can to make it difficult to learn too.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can we offer a more gentle learning curve for budding developers while still requiring "real" projects to use best practices for security and development Difficult question. In the past, the solution was just not to use any of that. A bunch of files inside a random folder in your computer that were not version controlled in any way. That worked, but that's also the reason I lost most of the source code that I'v…

> In the past, the solution was just not to use any of that. A bunch of files inside a random folder in your computer This is what my company does. Except we use git. Everyone just keeps their repo on their drive and there's no central "canonical" repository. Everyone has a personal folder in the main fileserver and they push frequently to their personal remote repo. Any time they send emails saying they've made a no…

That actually sounds quite nice and quite close how Torvalds thought git would be used I guess.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#243

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…

Why are we always teaching Git in the context of GitHub though? There HSA to be a simpler, more platform agnostic way.

This is a great question and one that I have been asking for quite some time. Many tutorials and guides make the mistake of conflating git with GitHub to the point that many new learners think GitHub is git.

When I teach git, I make it very clear that GitHub is one of many services you could use. For our purposes, we're using it because GitHub is quite popular and is a familiar place to look when interviewing with a potential employer. But I stress that there are other options (eg. I host my own instance of Gitea).

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#244
I've used this for years on an account I only occasionally commit something once or twice a year, from different computers (but still too complicated to use the online editor).

It's easy to forget that not every use case is a regular developer who has their dev environment set up. That said, for me it wasn't a big deal just switching to ssh keys like with my main account.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#246
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic terminal commands, GitHub, git and its most common commands. It took about 3 hours for us to get through just the most basic pieces." I don't get this. "Can you imagine? Learning to program a computer took us some hours!" What do you expect? That people without prior knowledge or experience just pick up source control in seconds? I'm honestly wondering -…

...they are so trivial that they can be figured out in less than three hours. Mercurial can be learned in minutes. Fossil in half an hour. Even git isn't particularly difficult; you can get "working knowledge" of it by glancing at this: https://git-send-email.io

You can learn Mercurial in three minutes if you have a background in command line administration and source control. But in a past life I have on several occasions found myself trying to train enterprises on how to use basic source control (as opposed to, say, SSHing into production systems manually and cp config.xml config.xml.bak), and failing to get the message through.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#247

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…

> "Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic terminal commands, GitHub, git and its most common commands. It took about 3 hours for us to get through just the most basic pieces." I don't get this. "Can you imagine? Learning to program a computer took us some hours!" What do you expect? That people without prior knowledge or experience just pick up source control in seconds? I'm honestly wondering -…

> What do you expect? That people without prior knowledge or experience just pick up source control in seconds?

I mean, ideally, that'd be great. I don't think there's any fundamental reason things can't be this way, many of these complexities are completely incidental, rather than inherent.

> Is it really too much to ask a newcomer to invest some hours into learning something these days?

No, but when I'm learning something, I prefer for my time to be spent on important stuff, not wasted unnecessarily.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#248
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot about the part where you run `git push` later and realize it didn't save your passkey, so you have to make another one. This time you Google how to save it and copy the top answer on StackOverflow, which uses the git credentials store to save it in plain text in your ~/.gitconfig file. Now is the passkey more secure?

That seems more like a problem with StackOverflow than anything else.

Yeah I would just edit that answer to add a big warning at the top.

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#249
post #71
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCM still doesn't support multiple users properly, though. Https auth is what I was using for a second GitHub account, so I'm not thrilled about this change. I want to have work and personal GitHub accounts on the same machine and very explicitly choose which account goes to which repo. Too often I have changes going in with the wrong user.name / user.email or account to the point where I paranoidly reauthenticate ev…

While this probably doesn’t completely solve your problem, have you tried using conditional includes in your .gitconfig? I’ve been using that to ensure that anything under ~/work uses my work email for user.email, but anything under ~/projects uses my personal email. It’s quite handy. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#_conditional_includes

Oh wow that is genius! I had no idea this existed, thanks!

Re: Git password authentication is shutting down

#250

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…

> "Such a simple idea required introducing the terminal, basic terminal commands, GitHub, git and its most common commands. It took about 3 hours for us to get through just the most basic pieces." I don't get this. "Can you imagine? Learning to program a computer took us some hours!" What do you expect? That people without prior knowledge or experience just pick up source control in seconds? I'm honestly wondering -…

When I learned programming 20 years ago, it went like this

Start QBASIC

Enter:

PRINT "Hello World!"

Run the program.

Congratulations, you wrote your first program and have become a software developer

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