Version Control with Subversion

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Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Network Model

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example, if a server is configured to allow anyone in the world to read a repository,

then the server will never issue an authentication challenge when a client attempts to

svn checkout.

If the client’s network request writes new data to the repository (e.g.,

svn commit),

then a new revision tree is created. If the client’s request was authenticated, then the

authenticated user’s name is stored as the value of the

svn:author property on the

new revision (see “Unversioned Properties” in Chapter 5). If the client was not

authenticated (in other words, the server never issued an authentication challenge),

then the revision’s

svn:author property is empty.

*

Client Credentials Caching

Many servers are configured to require authentication on every request. This can

become a big annoyance to users, who are forced to type their passwords over and

over again.

Happily, the Subversion client has a remedy for this: a built-in system for caching

authentication credentials on disk. By default, whenever the commandline client suc-

cessfully authenticates itself to a server, it saves the credentials in the user’s private

runtime configuration area—in ~/.subversion/auth/ on Unix-like systems or

%APPDATA%/Subversion/auth/ on Windows. (The runtime area is covered further

in “Runtime Configuration ...