Re: Still unable to 'git push' or ssh to sourceware -- resolved

[Mark Geisert <mark@maxrnd.com>]

On Tue, 10 Nov 2015, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> You're missing something important.  The key you sent to sware and the
> other key you sent to the cygwin-apps list are both the public part of
> your keys.  This public part of a key *never* requires a passphrase.
> After all it's supposed to be readable by everyone, right?
>
> If ssh asks for a passphrase, it's your local, *private* key which is
> encrypted using this passphrase.  Therefore this has nothing to do with
> ssh on the remote machine.  It can't require passphrases since,
> obviously, it doesn't know your private key.  The private key never
> leaves your local machine.  So this asking for a passphrase is a local
> problem on your machine which you would have to fix locally.
>
> Btw., I never saw the problem that a local key without passphrase results
> in ssh asking for a passphrase.  The difference in the keyfile (encrypted
> vs. non-encrypted) is obvious to ssh:
>
>  $ head -2 .ssh/my_key
>  -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
>  Proc-Type: 4,ENCRYPTED

Many thanks for this correction to my broken mental model of passphrases 
vs passwords.  Between these nuggets-o-knowledge and a fix to my 
~/.ssh/config (i.e. IdentityFile *must* refer to a private key file) I was 
able to 'git push' my cygutils updates to sourceware with my original key.

I am now debugging a revised cygutils.cygport and figuring out where I can 
host the updated tar.xz packages for review.  I've got a place in mind.
Thanks again,

..mark