Version Control with Subversion

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

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

svnserve; A Custom Server

|

113

Using the -r option effectively modifies the location that the program treats as the

root of the remote filesystem space. Clients then use URLs that have that path por-

tion removed from them, leaving much shorter (and much less revealing) URLs:

$ svn checkout svn://host.example.com/project1

...

Built-In Authentication and Authorization

When a client connects to an svnserve process, the following things happen:

• The client selects a specific repository.

• The server processes the repository’s conf/svnserve.conf file, and begins to

enforce any authentication and authorization policies defined therein.

• Depending on the situation and authorization policies:

• The client may be allowed to make requests anonymously, without ever

receiving an authentication challenge.

• The client may be challenged for authentication at any time.

• If operating in tunnel mode, the client will declare itself to be already exter-

nally authenticated.

At the time of writing, the server only knows how to send a CRAM-MD5 (see RFC

2195) authentication challenge. In essence, the server sends a bit of data to the cli-

ent. The client uses its password to encrypt the data with the MD5 hash algorithm,

and sends it back. The server performs the same computation with the stored pass-

word to ...