Disable Gnome Keyring for SVN

Oct 28, 2009

Although I am personally switching over to git for my projects, we still use Subversion here at work.

Something I've noticed recently is that SVN now stores my passwords in gnome-keyring. This appears to be a feature in version 1.6 and I am running 1.6.5. It seems from that article that it can also use KDE's Wallet system.

However, I do not use Gnome, and I don't like KDE wallet. Plus, sometimes it seemed that gnome-keyring would stick on me during a transaction. The only way to fix it was to run another transaction (svn update usually) in another shell.

I finally got sick of it today and Google'd around. Here is the fix I found, edit ~/.subversion/config and add one key.

[auth]
password-stores =

Easy enough, and once I did everything was a-okay. Hope this helps someone else!

jmhobbs@katya:/var/www/experimental/source$ svn commit -m "SOME MESSAGE"
Password for 'default' GNOME keyring:
Sending        SOME FILE
Transmitting file data ...
Committed revision 448.
jmhobbs@katya:/var/www/experimental/source$ vim /home/jmhobbs/.subversion/config
jmhobbs@katya:/var/www/experimental/source$ svn update
Authentication realm:  Private SVN
Password for 'jmhobbs':
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ATTENTION!  Your password for authentication realm:

    Private SVN

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/jmhobbs/.subversion/servers'.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Store password unencrypted (yes/no)? yes
At revision 448.
jmhobbs@katya:/var/www/experimental/source$