This is a semicolon-delimited list of HTTP authentication types which the client will deem acceptable. Valid types are basic, digest, and negotiate, with the default behavior being acceptance of any these authentication types. A client which insists on not transmitting authentication credentials in cleartext might, for example, be configured such that the value of this option is digest;negotiate—omitting basic from the list. (Note that this setting is only honored by Subversion's Neon-based HTTP provider module.)

This specifies whether Subversion should attempt to compress network requests made to DAV-ready servers. The default value is yes (though compression will occur only if that capability is compiled into the network layer). Set this to no to disable compression, such as when debugging network transmissions.

Subversion provides a pair of repository access modules that understand its WebDAV network protocol. The original one, which shipped with Subversion 1.0, is libsvn_ra_neon (though back then it was called libsvn_ra_dav). Newer Subversion versions also provide libsvn_ra_serf, which uses a different underlying implementation and aims to support some of the newer HTTP concepts.

At this point, libsvn_ra_serf is still considered experimental, though it appears to work in the common cases quite well. To encourage experimentation, Subversion provides the http-library runtime configuration option to allow users to specify (generally, or in a per-server-group fashion) which WebDAV access module they'd prefer to use—neon or serf.

This specifies a comma-separated list of patterns for repository hostnames that should be accessed directly, without using the proxy machine. The pattern syntax is the same as is used in the Unix shell for filenames. A repository hostname matching any of these patterns will not be proxied.

This specifies the hostname of the proxy computer through which your HTTP-based Subversion requests must pass. It defaults to an empty value, which means that Subversion will not attempt to route HTTP requests through a proxy computer, and will instead attempt to contact the destination machine directly.

This specifies the password to supply to the proxy machine. It defaults to an empty value.

This specifies the port number on the proxy host to use. It defaults to an empty value.

This specifies the username to supply to the proxy machine. It defaults to an empty value.

This specifies the amount of time, in seconds, to wait for a server response. If you experience problems with a slow network connection causing Subversion operations to time out, you should increase the value of this option. The default value is 0, which instructs the underlying HTTP library, Neon, to use its default timeout setting.

This is an integer mask that the underlying HTTP library, Neon, uses for choosing what type of debugging output to yield. The default value is 0, which will silence all debugging output. For more information about how Subversion makes use of Neon, see Chapter 8, Embedding Subversion.

This is a semicolon-delimited list of paths to files containing certificates of the certificate authorities (or CAs) that are accepted by the Subversion client when accessing the repository over HTTPS.

If a host (or set of hosts) requires an SSL client certificate, you'll normally be prompted for a path to your certificate. By setting this variable to that same path, Subversion will be able to find your client certificate automatically without prompting you. There's no standard place to store your certificate on disk; Subversion will grab it from any path you specify.

If your SSL client certificate file is encrypted by a passphrase, Subversion will prompt you for the passphrase whenever the certificate is used. If you find this annoying (and don't mind storing the password in the servers file), you can set this variable to the certificate's passphrase. You won't be prompted anymore.

The value of this option is the name of the PKCS#11 provider from which an SSL client certificate will be drawn (if the server asks for one). This setting is only honored by Subversion's Neon-based HTTP provider module.

Set this variable to yes if you want Subversion to automatically trust the set of default CAs that ship with OpenSSL.

This setting is the same as store-passwords, except that it enables or disables on-disk caching of all authentication information: usernames, passwords, server certificates, and any other types of cacheable credentials.

This instructs Subversion to cache, or not to cache, passwords that are supplied by the user in response to server authentication challenges. The default value is yes. Set this to no to disable this on-disk password caching. You can override this option for a single instance of the svn command using the --no-auth-cache command-line parameter (for those subcommands that support it). For more information regarding that, see the section called “Caching credentials”. Note that regardless of how this option is configured, Subversion will not store passwords in plaintext unless the store-plaintext-passwords option is also set to yes.

This variable is only important on UNIX-like systems. It controls what the Subversion client does in case the password for the current authentication realm can only be cached on disk in unencrypted form, in the ~/.subversion/auth/ caching area. You can set it to yes or no to enable or disable caching of passwords in unencrypted form, respectively. The default setting is ask, which causes the Subversion client to ask you each time a new password is about to be added to the ~/.subversion/auth/ caching area.

This option controls whether Subversion will cache SSL client certificate passphrases provided by the user. Its value defaults to yes. Set this to no to disable this passphrase caching.

This option controls whether Subversion, when attempting to cache an SSL client certificate passphrase, will be allowed to do so using its on-disk plaintext storage mechanism. The default value of this option is ask, which causes the Subversion client to ask you each time a new client certificate passphrase is about to be added to the ~/.subversion/auth/ caching area. Set this option's value to yes or no to indicate your preference and avoid related prompts.

This comma-delimited list specifies which (if any) system-provided password stores Subversion should attempt to use when saving and retrieving cached authentication credentials, and in what order Subversion should prefer them. The default value is gnome-keyring, kwallet, keychain, windows-crypto-api, representing the GNOME Keyring, KDE Wallet, Mac OS X Keychain, and Microsoft Windows cryptography API, respectively. Listed stores which are not available on the system are ignored.

This option has been deprecated from the config file. It now lives as a per-server configuration item in the servers configuration area. See the section called “Servers” for details.

This option has been deprecated from the config file. It now lives as a per-server configuration item in the servers configuration area. See the section called “Servers” for details.

This specifies the absolute path of a differencing program, used when Subversion generates “diff” output (such as when using the svn diff command). By default, Subversion uses an internal differencing library—setting this option will cause it to perform this task using an external program. See the section called “Using External Differencing and Merge Tools” for more details on using such programs.

Like the --extensions (-x) command-line option, this specifies additional options passed to the file content differencing engine. The set of meaningful extension options differs depending on whether the client is using Subversion's internal differencing engine or an external mechanism. See the output of svn help diff for details. The default value for this option is -u.

This specifies the absolute path of a three-way differencing program. Subversion uses this program to merge changes made by the user with those received from the repository. By default, Subversion uses an internal differencing library—setting this option will cause it to perform this task using an external program. See the section called “Using External Differencing and Merge Tools” for more details on using such programs.

This flag should be set to true if the program specified by the diff3-cmd option accepts a --diff-program command-line parameter.

This specifies the program Subversion will use to query the user for certain types of textual metadata or when interactively resolving conflicts. See the section called “Using External Editors” for more details on using external text editors with Subversion.

This specifies the program that Subversion will use to perform three-way merge operations on your versioned files. See the section called “Using External Differencing and Merge Tools” for more details on using such programs.

This instructs Subversion to automatically set properties on newly added or imported files. The default value is no, so set this to yes to enable this feature. The [auto-props] section of this file specifies which properties are to be set on which files.

When running the svn status command, Subversion lists unversioned files and directories along with the versioned ones, annotating them with a ? character (see the section called “See an overview of your changes”). Sometimes it can be annoying to see uninteresting, unversioned items—for example, object files that result from a program's compilation—in this display. The global-ignores option is a list of whitespace-delimited globs that describe the names of files and directories that Subversion should not display unless they are versioned. The default value is *.o *.lo *.la *.al .libs *.so *.so.[0-9]* *.a *.pyc *.pyo *.rej *~ #*# .#* .*.swp .DS_Store.

As well as svn status, the svn add and svn import commands also ignore files that match the list when they are scanning a directory. You can override this behavior for a single instance of any of these commands by explicitly specifying the filename, or by using the --no-ignore command-line flag.

For information on finer-grained control of ignored items, see the section called “Ignoring Unversioned Items”.

This is a Boolean option that specifies whether Subversion should try to resolve conflicts interactively. If its value is yes (which is the default value), Subversion will prompt the user for how to handle conflicts in the manner demonstrated in the section called “Resolve Any Conflicts”. Otherwise, it will simply flag the conflict and continue its operation, postponing resolution to a later time.

This variable sets the default character set encoding for commit log messages. It's a permanent form of the --encoding option (see the section called “svn Options”). The Subversion repository stores log messages in UTF-8 and assumes that your log message is written using your operating system's native locale. You should specify a different encoding if your commit messages are written in any other encoding.

This option, new to Subversion 1.5, specifies the path of a MIME types mapping file, such as the mime.types file provided by the Apache HTTP Server. Subversion uses this file to assign MIME types to newly added or imported files. See the section called “Automatic Property Setting” and the section called “File Content Type” for more about Subversion's detection and use of file content types.

This Boolean option corresponds to svn commit's --no-unlock option, which tells Subversion not to release locks on files you've just committed. If this runtime option is set to yes, Subversion will never release locks automatically, leaving you to run svn unlock explicitly. It defaults to no.

The value of this option is a space-delimited list of file extensions that Subversion should preserve when generating conflict filenames. By default, the list is empty. This option is new to Subversion 1.5.

When Subversion detects conflicting file content changes, it defers resolution of those conflicts to the user. To assist in the resolution, Subversion keeps pristine copies of the various competing versions of the file in the working copy. By default, those conflict files have names constructed by appending to the original filename a custom extension such as .mine or .REV (where REV is a revision number). A mild annoyance with this naming scheme is that on operating systems where a file's extension determines the default application used to open and edit that file, appending a custom extension prevents the file from being easily opened by its native application. For example, if the file ReleaseNotes.pdf was conflicted, the conflict files might be named ReleaseNotes.pdf.mine or ReleaseNotes.pdf.r4231. While your system might be configured to use Adobe's Acrobat Reader to open files whose extensions are .pdf, there probably isn't an application configured on your system to open all files whose extensions are .r4231.

You can fix this annoyance by using this configuration option, though. For files with one of the specified extensions, Subversion will append to the conflict file names the custom extension just as before, but then also reappend the file's original extension. Using the previous example, and assuming that pdf is one of the extensions configured in this list thereof, the conflict files generated for ReleaseNotes.pdf would instead be named ReleaseNotes.pdf.mine.pdf and ReleaseNotes.pdf.r4231.pdf. Because each file ends in .pdf, the correct default application will be used to view them.

Normally your working copy files have timestamps that reflect the last time they were touched by any process, whether your own editor or some svn subcommand. This is generally convenient for people developing software, because build systems often look at timestamps as a way of deciding which files need to be recompiled.

In other situations, however, it's sometimes nice for the working copy files to have timestamps that reflect the last time they were changed in the repository. The svn export command always places these “last-commit timestamps” on trees that it produces. By setting this config variable to yes, the svn checkout, svn update, svn switch, and svn revert commands will also set last-commit timestamps on files that they touch.