No password issues

In prin­ciple I’m in favour of the ‘log in with X’ way of doing things (mod­ulo user exper­i­ence issues such as try­ing to remem­ber which ser­vice you picked to sign up with in the first place). There is, how­ever, more to it than that in some cases. Example: using the online repos­it­ory ser­vice bit­buck­et.

Sign­ing up in the first place with one of my Google accounts worked as expec­ted. The next step, of adding a git repos­it­ory and push­ing files to it, was a little more com­plic­ated. You need to use a reg­u­lar pass­word for git push and, of course, bit­buck­et does­n’t have the pass­word for my Google account. And I did­n’t have a reg­u­lar pass­word for the account, hav­ing set it up using my Google account, so I had to go through the pass­word-reset dance to cre­ate a new pass­word that bit­buck­et is allowed to know.

In oth­er words, for these sorts of ser­vices I need a pass­word that the ser­vice is allowed to know; log­ging in with oth­er ser­vices is an add-on but not a replace­ment. This isn’t hard to under­stand when you stop and think about what’s going on (in the browser the ser­vice relies on a lot of browser redir­ects which aren’t avail­able in the com­mand line), but it did take me a minute or two to fig­ure out that I would have to reset my here­to­fore blank pass­word to get one that I could use. (Bit­buck­et also sup­ports SSH iden­tit­ies and I’ll prob­ably set that up instead of the password.)