HTTP authentication vs. --username and --password

I couldn't seem to find any discussions or issues about this, but I swear I
remember one in the past. Anyway, why does the following not work at
current? Should it? :

$ svn co http://username:password@server/repos/

This seems more natural to me than using --username and --password (hopefully
those options could be removed).

This also greatly affects my ability to use modules. A quick check shows
that:

$ svnadmin create test
$ svn co file://`pwd`/test -d work
$ cd work
$ svn propedit svn:externals .
[in emacs:]
module http://username:password@my-other-server/repos/blah
$ svn ci -m ""

[at this point, I couldn't just 'svn up' to get it to try and check out the
modules, maybe that is a whole other bug]

$ cd ..
$ svn co file://`pwd`/test -d work2
[svn now asks for username and password to access my-other-server]

Security issues aside (why would I want to store a user/pass for another
repository in the first place?), is it at all possible to do this?

I ask that you consider using the http://username:password@server format
universally, unless there is another consistant approach available. Thanks!
Like I said, I'm sure this has already been discussed... can someone point me
to that thread?

While on the discussion of authentication, and in a similar vein, the way auth
info is stored in .svn doesn't make sense to me. I see an auth/ directory,
with files 'username' and 'password'. Then I also see:

<entry
   committed-rev="1"
   name="svn:this_dir"
   committed-date="2002-07-14T10:44:21.733385Z"
   url="http://username@server/repos/path..."
   last-author="username"
   kind="dir"
   revision="N"/>

in the entries file. Is the 'username@' part redundant (or inversely, is
auth/username redundant)? If I were to change the contents of auth/username
(yes I know 'svn switch' should work, but bear with me), will the <entry>
need to be changed as well?

-- 
Peter Davis
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