http transport should tell that authentication is required instead of failing with an HTTPError exception

In bzr 0.11.0dev0 you get another traceback:
bzr: ERROR: exceptions.ValueError: unsupported format character '@' (0x40) at index 12

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/commands.py", line 611, in run_bzr_catch_errors
    return run_bzr(argv)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/commands.py", line 573, in run_bzr
    ret = run(*run_argv)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/commands.py", line 282, in run_argv_aliases
    return self.run(**all_cmd_args)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/builtins.py", line 660, in run
    br_from = Branch.open(from_location)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/branch.py", line 113, in open
    control = bzrdir.BzrDir.open(base, _unsupported)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/bzrdir.py", line 470, in open
    format = BzrDirFormat.find_format(t)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/bzrdir.py", line 995, in find_format
    return format.probe_transport(transport)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/bzrdir.py", line 1005, in probe_transport
    format_string = transport.get(".bzr/branch-format").read()
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/transport/http/__init__.py", line 226, in get
    code, response_file = self._get(relpath, None)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/transport/http/_urllib.py", line 61, in _get
    tail_amount=tail_amount)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/transport/http/_urllib.py", line 85, in _get_url_impl
    url = extract_auth(url, manager)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/transport/http/__init__.py", line 72, in extract_auth
    user=username, host=host)
  File "/Volumes/unix/vila/src/bzr.dev/bzrlib/ui/text.py", line 76, in get_password
    prompt = (prompt % kwargs).encode(sys.stdout.encoding, 'replace')
ValueError: unsupported format character '@' (0x40) at index 12

bzr 0.11.0dev0 on python 2.4.2.final.0 (darwin)
arguments: ['/Volumes/home/vila/bin/bzr', 'branch', 'http+urllib://<user>@<host>/pub/web.dav/', 'webdav-local']

with the attached patch you get prompted for the password at each connection which becomes rapidly boring, but that's another story.

So the password manager isn't managing things correctly?

Also, this could be tested by writing a custom UIFactory that doesn't actually prompt the user, but just does:
prompt % kwargs
and returns something.

If you do that, we can easily merge the fix.

The password manager does its job, the problem is that a new password manager is created for each request in the actual _urllib implementation.
To correct that, we need to share the connection between the requests of one transport first.
Then we should share that password manager between the transports.
At that point the question becomes: do we *globally* share one password manager or do we wait for bzr to provide transports "cousins" at transport creation ?
I favor the former because things can become complicated when handling redirections (in the worst case, you can have a new password required at each redirection). One can even imagine that multiple passwords get required for different directories inside the same repository (multiplied by the redirections, I don't even want to calculate how many passords the user may have to type... Ok, that is a bit extreme and we may forbid it, but...)

Commited in ~bzr/bzr/bzr.urllib.keepalive

urllib.keepalive should land in 0.13