While happily installing prerequisites to build an app on Solaris 10, i enjoyed having Mercurial already installed in the "base system".. except for a BIG issue: digest authentication was broken. I tcpdumped the traffic exchanged between the mercurial client and the CGI server and I saw that no Authorization header was sent, and obivously the server refused to serve the hg repository.

Before reinstalling python, maybe from source and replacing the default installation or having side by side two different versions, with consequent nuisances and dirt around the system, I tried a very very small patch to urllib2.py that... amusingly enough, fixed my problem:

--- urllib2.py~ Fri Jan 25 02:35:59 2008
+++ urllib2.py  Fri Jan 25 03:27:52 2008
@@ -815,7 +815,7 @@
             auth_val = 'Digest %s' % auth
             if req.headers.get(self.auth_header, None) == auth_val:
                 return None
-            req.add_unredirected_header(self.auth_header, auth_val)
+            req.add_header(self.auth_header, auth_val)
             resp = self.parent.open(req)
             return resp

I'm no fscking python expert (but the language is interesting), so don't ask me *WHY* it works, i simply followed the add_header comment that said "this method is useful for adding authentication headers" and replaced the unredirected_header method with the former. I really don't know why with Python2.5's urllib2 "everything works" even with that method, something must be broken somewhere else. A diff between the two urllibs gave me nothing, I really should learn Python one day or another.

I also found no information by googling keywords such as <<solaris "http {authorization,authentication}" {urllib2,python} {broken,not working} mercurial>> (shell interpolation intended), so I hope this post will be useful to someone .

Solaris looks like a nice beast, though. I'll have to learn more about it as well. .