Re: [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.16.0-rc0

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Jan 02, 2018 at 09:35:16PM -0800, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> > bturner@ubuntu:~$ ssh -V
> > OpenSSH_6.6.1p1 Ubuntu-2ubuntu2.8, OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014
> >
> > bturner@ubuntu:~$ ssh -G -p 7999 localhost
> > unknown option -- G
> > usage: ssh [-1246AaCfgKkMNnqsTtVvXxYy] [-b bind_address] [-c cipher_spec]
> [...]
> > Is it possible to adjust the check, somehow, so it doesn't impact
> > older OpenSSH versions like this? As it stands, it seems likely a fair
> > number of users who have an SSH command that does support -4, -6 and
> > -p are going to end up getting "penalized" because it doesn't also
> > support -G, and have to manually set their SSH variant to "ssh" (or
> > something other than "auto") to avoid the automatic detection.
> >
> > I'd love to say I have a brilliant idea for how to work around this,
> > oh and here's a patch, but I don't. One option might be trying to
> > actually review the output, and another might be to run "ssh -V", but
> > both of those have their own flaws (and the extra process forks aren't
> > "free").
> 
> I have tomorrow off, so I've filed https://crbug.com/git/7 to make
> sure I remember to follow up the day after.  Of course I'll be happy
> if someone updates that bug saying they've fixed it in the meantime.

It doesn't look like we ever applied anything to deal with this
regression. Just FYI, this bit me today when upgrading my git on a
system that has an ssh wrapper that understands "-p" just fine, but not
"-G". So the behavior described in [1], namely to just fallback to
assuming some basic openssh-ish options, would have worked for me.

To be honest, I could easily see an argument that I _should_ be setting
GIT_SSH_VARIANT to explain what my wrapper is expecting, even though it
happened to work before. But it seems like this discussion ended in
favor of calling this a regression that should be fixed, and AFAICT
nothing happened after. So I thought I'd ping and mention one more data
point.

-Peff

[1] https://public-inbox.org/git/xmqqk1wyhcey.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com/