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Re: svn commit: r1572105 - in /subversion/trunk/subversion: svn/auth-cmd.c svn/cl.h svn/svn.c tests/cmdline/getopt_tests_data/svn--help_stdout tests/cmdline/getopt_tests_data/svn_help_stdout

From: Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 15:11:30 +0100

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 05:48:42PM +0400, Ivan Zhakov wrote:
> On 27 February 2014 17:37, Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de> wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 02:06:38PM +0100, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> >> Also note that the help text mentions 'credentials' for this reason:
> >> auth: Manage cached authentication credentials.
> >
> > Another thing makes me wary about renaming the command right now
> > is that we might still extend the command's functionality, for 1.9
> > or even later.
> >
> > For instance, we could add an 'authentication' mode to this command,
> > which simply completes the authentication process for a given URL and
> > caches the credentials. Then the current name would be very suitable.
> That's exactly what I would like to avoid: pre-authentication will be very
> confusing for users IMHO. Some of them may decide that this is
> required/recommended workflow for Subversion.

Why is there a problem if people decide to do that? I don't see
a problem if people decide to pre-cache credentials, or even if
they believe that doing so was required. There are far worse
user interface problems we're already living with.

I'm more worried about people skimming the list of commands printed
by 'svn help' and not finding functionality they're looking for even
though it exists.

I'm not against changing the name of the command. But I think it
is more important right now to discuss and implement the desired
scope of functionality. Then we can more easily settle on a good name.

It could be useful to pre-cache credentials for repositories which only
require auth for write operations. For example, consider situations where
the svn client is run from scripts or cronjobs. Right now, we require
users to make a change to the repository history in this situation to
get a password cached, don't we?

Another thing that has been requested already when 'svnauth' was introduced
is to have a way of adding credentials to the cache without contacting
the server. This could be used to save a trusted SSL cert before contacting
the server, for example. And the corresponding API could be used by a GUI
client to edit/update cached credentials.
Received on 2014-02-27 15:12:06 CET

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