Question

I installed SVN on a Ubuntu machine and I can’t get my head around something.

Whenever I checkout something from the terminal I get this error about saving a non-encrypted password:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ATTENTION!  Your password for authentication realm:

   <[...]> Subversion Repository

can only be stored to disk
unencrypted!  You are advised to
configure your system so that
Subversion can store passwords
encrypted, if possible.  See the
documentation for details.

You can avoid future appearances of
this warning by setting the value of
the 'store-plaintext-passwords' option
to either 'yes' or 'no' in
'/home/[...]/.subversion/servers'.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I goggled it a bit but I couldn’t find anything useful. I found one topic where it said this was a client issue, not a server one, but I’m still not convinced.

It says “configure your system”; what exactly does it mean by that? The server or the client? If I’m the server, is there anything I can do about it? besides hiding the warning (like it says)…

Thanks!

Answer 1

It is a client issue. It warns you that the credentials used for the different servers are being stored in plain text. You can hide that warning or use an encrypted storage to cache the passwords.

See:
http://blogs.collab.net/subversion/2009/07/subversion-16-security-improvements