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Cloning non-existent repository asks for authentication

Problem

Cloning non-existent repository asks for authentication. (Fail instead of asking for credentials)

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/does-not-exist-group-f34f2/dne-123.git
Cloning into 'dne-123'...
Username for 'https://gitlab.com/':

I didn't realize the typo in the URL right away so I Googled whether I could clone a public repository without authentication and my expectations were correct so I looked at the command closer 👀

I got into this situation because I manually typed a repo URL into a virtual machine(VM) where I didn't have shared clipboard on to paste easily.

Proposal

Are we asking for authentication to not expose a 404 project that could potentially be a private project? In any case, I mis-typed the group name which is exposed anyway because you can go to the group creation page and try to create a group with the same name (returns "Path has already been taken" error)

Ideally, we could return fatal: repository 'dne-123' does not exist (normal error for git, try git clone asdf) for this case.

Not sure if we can add a message to that git command output, but if possible, we could add a message about the project not existing or needing authentication/permissions to see it. This would have clued me in on the URL being wrong instead of having to guess whether anonymous public clones are possible.

Related issues

cc @jramsay

Edited by Eric Eastwood