This section is from the "Version Control with Subversion" book, by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick and C. Michael Pilato. Also available from Amazon: Version Control with Subversion.
When you perform a Subversion operation that requires you to authenticate, by default Subversion caches your authentication credentials on disk. This is done for convenience, so that you don't have to continually re-enter your password for future operations. If you're concerned about caching your Subversion passwords,[3] you can disable caching either permanently or on a case-by-case basis.
To disable password caching for a particular one-time
command, pass the --no-auth-cache
option on
the commandline. To permanently disable caching, you can add
the line store-passwords = no
to your local
machine's Subversion configuration file. See the section called “Client Credentials Caching” for
details.
[3] Of course, you're not terribly worried—first because you know that you can't really delete anything from Subversion and, secondly, because your Subversion password isn't the same as any of the other three million passwords you have, right? Right?