A.10 Authentication

With CVS's pserver, you are required to login to the server before any read or write operation you even have to login for anonymous operations. With a Subversion repository using Apache HTTPD as the server, you don't provide any authentication credentials at the outset if an operation that you perform requires authentication, the server will challenge you for your credentials (whether those credentials are username and password, a client certificate, or even both). So, if your repository is world-readable, you will not be required to authenticate at all for read operations.

As with CVS, Subversion still caches your credentials on disk (in your ~/.subversion/auth/ directory), unless you tell it not to by using the --no-auth-cache switch.