My university recently started providing Git hosting over Smart HTTPS. Previously, they only provided subversion hosting. I’ve used git for around 2 years now, so this is great news for me, and I asked them to create a repository for my latest project. I try to clone the (empty) repository and . . . failure! It seems as though git failed to authenticate with the server, even though I provided valid credentials and had the appropriate certificates installed. This failure occurs on my MacBook Pro, so I quickly logged into one of the university machines and tried. Much to my surprise it everything works from their machines.
So I spent some time hunting down the differences. The most substantial difference was the version of curl and OpenSSL being used. Mine were much newer. After a few hours of searching online, I came to the conclusion that OpenSSL was at fault here. On a hunch, I resolved my issue by reinstalling curl, but this time with [+gnutls] instead of openssl (the default). So if you’re having issues dealing with Smart HTTPS hosted repositories using a new version of git (particularly if you are on OSX), then give this solution a try. Hopefully it will save you some time, as I couldn’t find this solution anywhere else.