Confusing error message if ssh login fails while using lp url

Bug #238776 reported by Rob Weir
18
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Bazaar
Confirmed
High
Unassigned
Breezy
Triaged
High
Unassigned

Bug Description

If bzr is presented with a lp: url and has a lp-login set, but finds it can't login (e.g. if no usable ssh keys are available), you get this error:

rob@hypercube:~/projects$ bzr branch lp:bzr-search ~/.bazaar/plugins/search
Permission denied (publickey).
bzr: ERROR: Connection closed: please check connectivity and permissions (and try -Dhpss if further diagnosis is required)

Maybe it could fall back to using HTTP instead of failing.

Revision history for this message
James Westby (james-w) wrote :

Hi,

This would be useful if http will work.

I think this would become part of the suggested overhaul of
transports, where the caller indicates whether they are going to
want to write to the transport and the provider acts appropriately.

Although, I'm not sure that there is any provision for fallback in
the current codebase, and so this might be quite a bit of work
on top of the above.

Thanks,

James

Changed in bzr:
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Andrew Bennetts (spiv) wrote :

This is more than Low importance I think. Judging from IRC it happens to new users quite regularly, and it's a pretty unfortunate first impression of bzr.

Part of the problem is that the "Permission denied (publickey)." message, which is probably the most important part of the output, is somewhat buried by the very verbose error that comes after it. And the advice to try "-Dhpss" is a red herring most of the time.

Ideally, bzr should notice when the SSH connection failed to establish, and report an error more like:

$ bzr branch lp:foo
Permission denied (publickey).
bzr: ERROR: Failed to establish SSH connection to <email address hidden>.

I'm not sure how easy that is to achieve, but it would be a large improvement.

Changed in bzr:
importance: Low → High
Jonathan Lange (jml)
tags: added: lp-directory lp-login
tags: added: launchpad
Jonathan Lange (jml)
tags: added: lpurl
removed: lp-directory
Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)
tags: added: check-for-breezy
Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)
tags: added: readonly
removed: check-for-breezy
Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)
Changed in brz:
status: New → Confirmed
status: Confirmed → Triaged
importance: Undecided → High
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