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

[Mark Hammond]

Ben Finney writes:

> "Mark Hammond" <mhammond at skippinet.com.au> writes:
> 
> > > 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.
> 
> I don't know how the Subversion client does authentication or whether
> it caches the credentials.

I believe it does - at least the option:

  --no-auth-cache          : do not cache authentication tokens

implies it does - and the behaviour I described certainly implies it does.

> Do remember, though, that the Bazaar client
> differs from the Subversion client in ...

Of course - I tried to be clear that I didn't think bzr was doing anything wrong - just explaining how a svn user might perceive things.

> > 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)
> 
> What change are you proposing should happen?

I'm not proposing any change.  However, explaining away people's concerns with "being asked for a password or passphrase is SSH's business" is techically correct for bzr, but not for svn, and so doesn't really explain the situation to them nor cover their existing use-cases.  I was hoping to help people understand the underlying motivation for such questions so they are able to answer them in the most helpful way.

Cheers,

Mark