Need better instructions for setting up ssh-agent for contrubuting

[amellnik]

At the Packages help page it says "If you encounter an error, make sure you’ve set up your SSH keys" and "You should ... set up an SSH agent on your development machine so that you can push changes with minimal hassle" and links only to [http://linux.die.net/man/1/ssh-agent](this man page). This is far from trivial on a windows machine, and after several hours of trying I still can't get Pkg.submit() to work.

[tkelman]

Yes, SSH keys are kind of a mess, especially on Windows. I think there's a decent set of instructions from github that we could link to. I personally push all changes for PR's via https remotes, and only use SSH keys for Pkg.tag and Pkg.publish, and only ever do those from a Linux machine. You can work in git-bash directly, or set up additional remotes while you're in shell mode.

[amellnik]

Do you mean https://help.github.com/articles/working-with-ssh-key-passphrases/ or some other ones? If the former, I'm afraid that despite adding the code to julia's copy of git .profile, but I'm sure there's several other steps I'm missing.

[tkelman]

Note that you're getting your markdown links backwards.

Unfortunately I don't think the ssh-agent approach works well with Windows at all, since you're unlikely to have a persistent posix shell running in the background. We could translate that ssh-agent script from bash into Julia and add it to juliarc.jl, but then it's only good for as long as you keep Julia open, since processes spawned by Julia will (I think) be closed when you close Julia. So I believe that would mean you'd need to re-enter your key passphrase every time you start Julia, which really isn't much better than just entering your github password every time you push over https.

[tkelman]

What might work would be adding the ssh-agent code to the .profile or .bashrc that git-bash uses, and always starting Julia from within that git-bash. This is a pretty roundabout way to do things though, relative to normal Windows usage.

[amellnik]

Whoops, thanks! Even a kludged-together method that works explained in detail would be a good first step.

[tkelman]

Well I don't use SSH keys on Windows, so if you can try experimenting with things and come up with something that works, we'd welcome a contribution to the documentation.

[amellnik]

I'm afraid I've spent several hours trying to get it to work at this point, which is why I posted here (I also opened a thread on stack exchange in case anyone there was able to get it working). I'm not a particularly savvy git user though, so maybe there's an easy solution I missed.

[tkelman]

Understandable. I'd recommend you use https remotes then, unless someone has other suggestions.

[pao]

Use HTTPS remotes and the credentials helper: https://gitcredentialstore.codeplex.com/

If you insist on not doing that and using SSH instead, there's Pageant/Plink, from the PuTTY suite: http://devjar.me/post/22705088626/use-putty-pageant-with-git-on-windows

[jakebolewski]

We won't be using SSH on 0.5 so this seems to be no longer an issue. Please open a new issue if we need better docs for the https remotes and credential helpers.