how to prevent bzr+ssh from asking a password each time I commit a change?

[Mark Hammond]

> Being asked for a password or passphrase is SSH's business; if you
> don't want to be challenged constantly you need to arrange that 
> your public key is authorized to access the remote account and to 
> have an `ssh-agent` running to hold the passphrase locally.

While you are obviously correct, I don't think its particularly uncommon for people to have https svn repositories that only support password authentication.  When using svn directly it prompts for credentials and caches them, and often you don't see any auth after that at all - all without setting up ssh keys around the organization.

Such people are then surprised to find that bzr-svn is requesting the credentials so often, while svn itself hitting the exact same repostitory does not.  The expectation is that by default it will be asked for once and then remembered, so it appears as though bzr-svn must be doing something wrong.
 
Note that I'm not trying to argue that is a good model to use for authentication, but IMO it might explain where the perceptions and expectations comes from (and possibly will continue to come from)

Cheers,

Mark