Why won’t ssh-agent save my unencrypted key for later use?

Why won’t ssh-agent save my unencrypted key for later use?

I recently was annoyed by always having to enter my private keys passphrase every time I wanted to do a git push to or pull from a public git repository. Turns out that if you are logged into a Gnome session on an Ubuntu machine it will automatically add you key to ssh-agent, but if you are logged into a bash session (as I was) then it won’t.

So you can either manually do the ssh-add yourself or following the instructions in the answer to my question you can setup an automatic way of facilitating this.

One problem I discovered is that if you have git displaying the current branch information in your bash prompt like me then when you start a session it will ask you for your passphrase before rendering your bash prompt.

I am thinking that to work around this I could change the git function in the .bash_profile file to look at the arguments passed to it and if it is a remote operation such as a pull, push or clone then trigger the ssh-add otherwise it can safely skip it.

Any other ideas or patches?