Question: (answer following).
I’m installing lsstsw on a CentOS 7 system, with an older version of git. I was able to git clone lsstsw, and it went on to deploy miniconda and git, but then failed when starting to clone lsst packages:
::: Deploying versiondb
Cloning into 'versiondb'...
fatal: Unable to find remote helper for 'https'
Answer:
The relevant error message here is that one about “Unable to find remote helper for ‘https’”: this is an error message from git indicating that it does not have support for https.
The problem is that lsstsw had to build git (due to an old, stock version of git on the machine) but that curl-devel was not installed prior to build – the https support comes in with curl-devel.
So, the answer here was to yum install curl-devel, then remove the lsstsw installation, and restart (reclone and then rerun ./bin/deploy).
Presumably, you could also install a new git elsewhere with https support.