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svnpasswordsdebiancredentials

Subversion prompts for username and password

In the course of a software installation, a version control tool called Subversion has to be used:

mkdir ~/mm
cd ~/mm
svn co https://valelab4.ucsf.edu/svn/micromanager2/trunk/ micro-manager1.4
svn co https://valelab4.ucsf.edu/svn/3rdpartypublic/

I'm a bit lost as to what is being done here, but a password and username is being prompted:

$ svn co https://valelab4.ucsf.edu/svn/micromanager2/trunk/ micro-manager1.4
Authentication realm: <https://valelab4.ucsf.edu:443> Micro-Manager Subversion repository
Password for 'user':

When I just keep hitting Enter, I get the following:

Authentication realm: <https://valelab4.ucsf.edu:443> Micro-Manager Subversion repository
Username: 
Password for '': 

Authentication realm: <https://valelab4.ucsf.edu:443> Micro-Manager Subversion repository
Username: 
Password for '': 

svn: E215004: No more credentials or we tried too many times.
Authentication failed

Does anyone know what happens here, what credentials are required and for what purpose?

Solution
    • subversion is a tool that fetches data from a remote-server.
    • the remote-server can be configured to grant access to everybody (typically read-only) or to limit access to authorized people using a username/password scheme
    • the remote-server you are trying to access obviously has chosen to restrict access to authorized people.
      • in order to access it, you need a secret username/password combination
      • why the owners of the repository chose to protect its content with a password, only they can tell.
        • maybe because the code had legal issues.
        • maybe because they took down their public subversion server altogether (keeping it running for internal uses only)
        • best ask them directly.
      • the only people who can give you a valid username/password combination are the owners of the repository

    to answer the underlying question ("how can i get the micro-manager microscope software", which btw would be off-topic), a quick google search for "micro-manager microscope" yields a public and active git-repository hosted on GitHub https://github.com/micro-manager/micro-manager