On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 04:34:19PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> >> Actually, the best would be to launch something capable of interpreting html
> >> forms on the url given by the error.
> >
> > Doing that portably is near impossible (keep in mind that git runs on
> > things like antique versions of Solaris).
>
> Can't the you let the user specify a browser command (firefox, elinks w3m) to
> auto-feed the portal page to when needed ?
Yes, that's why I said "we could add a configuration option" in the part
that you snipped. But doing it out of the box is not going to be
portable.
> The main problem with captive portals is when they shut down the connection
> and the user has no idea how to restore it (and error 511 is intended to fix
> this, but that won't do a lot of good if the user does is not shown the
> captive portal url transmitted with the error)
In my experience, the captive portal process usually goes like this:
1. Connect to network.
2. Try some non-browser command. Wonder why in the world it isn't
working.
3. Open a browser and say "Ah, I see. A captive portal".
The 511 proposal makes step 2 a lot better if the protocol is http[1].
But it pretty much makes it better even without non-browser client
support, because at least you will get a 511 error instead of having git
complain that the remote repository is corrupted (which happens if the
captive portal returns a redirect to an html page).
We should already be doing that. Adding more support could make step 3 a
little nicer, but like I said, I'd be more interested in seeing a real
case first. It may even be a feature that would be more appropriate to
curl (which git builds on for http access).
-Peff
[1] Of course it doesn't help at all for git:// or ssh:// (which are
usually even worse off in the first place, as many captive portals
will simply drop the packets, making it look like the remote server
is down).
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