Confirming user name and password

[Benoit Boissinot]

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Martin Geisler <mg at lazybytes.net> wrote:
> Jason Harris <jason at jasonfharris.com> writes:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> From MacHg I just discovered the following: I am likely just missing
>> something but is there a command which will test to see if a user-name
>> + password are acceptable to a server?
>
> There is no command that just tests the password -- but you can work
> around the problem, see below.
>
>> I was using the identify command to see if I could log in with the
>> given username and password.
>>
>> [Volt:~/test/exclude-changesets] exclude-changesets 3(3) ⌘ hg identify --rev tip https://jfh:dog@bitbucket.org/jfh/exclude-changesets
>> 8169bbc96762
>> [Volt:~/test/exclude-changesets] exclude-changesets 3(3) ⌘ hg identify --rev tip https://jfh:cat@bitbucket.org/jfh/exclude-changesets
>> 8169bbc96762
>>
>> Clearly the password can't be both dog and cat. Is it a bug that the
>> server doesn't reject the request when the password is incorrect?
>> Actually is this bitbucket specific?
>
> No, the explanation is much simpler: you are authenticated as needed,
> and read-only operations require no authentication on a public repo.
>
> You should do a dummy operation that requires authentication. In
> Mercurial that means an operation that pushes something to the repo.
> Since you don't want to push random changesets around for this check, I
> suggest you instead try pushing a new pushkey namespace:

You could theoretically craft an empty bundle to push to the remote server.

Benoit