[feature] Add a `remotes.json` field to prohibit anonymous access

What is your suggestion?

I would like Conan to add a field to remotes.json that allows, on a per-remote basis, prohibiting Conan from attempting to access said remote without authentication.

We have a remote which has different behavior for authenticated and non-authenticated users. Previously, the behavior was to reject non-authenticated users, but it was recently changed to permit non-authenticated users and serve only a subset of packages. We don't have control over the authentication policy of the remote and it was changed without notice to us, which ended up breaking our CI when Conan degraded to anonymous access.

Since we know in advance we require authenticated access, I would prefer if we are able to instruct Conan about that situation to completely disable the anonymous connection attempt and skip right to the authentication step. I would like this to happen automatically via conan install as it does today when anonymous access fails, without having to preemptively run conan remote login or conan auth to reduce developer friction.

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In summary: Add require_authentication: [true / false] to remotes.json, defaulting to false. When enabled, conan install (and other accesses) to a remote skip the anonymous access step and immediately proceed to authenticated access. If authentication fails, Conan immediately errors as it does today with a remote that requires authentication.

Have you read the CONTRIBUTING guide?

• I've read the CONTRIBUTING guide