Better handling of authenitcation across multiple instances

[jamesharris-garmin]

I very often work with AOSP style projects that are composed of repositories across multiple gerrit top level instances that can co-exist in the same workspace.

It seems like I can only really authenticate to a single gerrit instance per workspace under the current forumation of the tool.

Would it be posisble to re-define the tool to better tie into the git API and possibly look for URL authentication via the ~/.netrc authentication or other authentication mechanisms external to vscode settings?

[SanderRonde]

Authentication is currently not the biggest hurdle to multi-instance workspaces imo, the thing I struggle most with is how things would work UI-wise etc. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea (although it does incur quite some complexity) but there are some things where I'm not really sure how things would work. Maybe you (as a multi-repo workspace user) can tell me what you'd expect behavior to be in these situations and maybe it'll turn out to be not super hard to do:

• When you open the changes tab, what would you expect to see? All changes in all instances listed together, a sort of picker where you can pick one, only the ones for the "current" repo, determined by which file is open?
• Similarly what would commands that operate without context do, for example the change picker (in the bottom bar). Would it again show all changes or only the ones for the current repo?

So I think the main question is how would you determine the current repo, or maybe we want all changes from all repos combined together (which would probably make quite some API calls quite a bit slower). If the answer is that we do just take the current file, is it going to be a situation where you are likely to switch repos often? Do you generally stick to a repo or do you hop back and forth?