Re: non-interactive user authentication

In a message dated: 07 Oct 2002 10:25:19 CDT
Karl Fogel said:

>Peter Schuller <peter.schuller@infidyne.com> writes:
>> Another issie is if the username and password on the server has become
>> invalid since the last time you used the repository. Will svn prompt or
>> fail?
>
>Mrm. Hmmm.
>
>We can't be the first project to encounter this problem. Is there
>already a convention about how to handle it, or do different programs
>do different things?
>
>(Re detecting whether stdin is a tty, is that really reliable? We'd
>need to add it to APR, at any rate...)

Why not use an external authentication mechanism like ssh/rsh. This
is similar to what rsync does. There really isn't any built-in auth
mechanism to rsync, but you have to have access to the server itself
to connect using rsync.

You could have an auth switch to svn which worked like:

        svn -e ssh user@host:/path/to/repository

Or something, then pass the auth portion off to something completely
external to svn, like ssh.

With this in place, one could use ssh keys on the server, which would
completely eliminate the need for entering usernames and passwords/phrases,
provided something like ssh-agent were employed by the user.

I'm not advocating ssh as the only mechanism, just that an external,
modular approach might be best. For instance, rsync allows the use
of either rsh or ssh. Couldn't svn do the same?

-- 
Seeya,
Paul
--
	It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
   but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.
	 If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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