GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 600758
gnome-keyring demands unspecified password, breaking svn commits
Last modified: 2009-11-05 02:50:13 UTC
Bug forwarded from here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-keyring/+bug/473139 at the request of Sebastien Bacher of Canonical. Brief summary: as of upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10, svn access to https repositories causes the gnome-keyring manager to prompt for the user's local system login password (it was finally determined - which password it wanted wasn't initially clear). The workaround is to delete the file ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring. GUI SVN clients, e.g. kdesvn, appear to be unaffected. It is not clear to me whether or not this is a bug in gnome-keyring, svn, or possibly an Ubuntu-specific configuration error, and my apologies in advance if i've mis-categorized this post.
Yes, this was a surprise for me too. Subversion chooses to prompt for the gnome-keyring keyring password rather than allow a prompt to be shown for the same. So, this is not a gnome-keyring bug, but a subversion one. BTW, by default the keyring password is the same as your (unix) user login passwd.