Subverting certificate warnings in svnX

Or how to press 'p' when you can’t…

Writing code is fun. Keeping the different versions of all those source files in control can be a chore, but Subversion makes it a lot easier, and GUI client applications like svnX make it more interactive.

I wanted to try out mogenerator, for which the source lives in a SourceForge subversion folder.

First thing to remember is that the path to use is: https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/{project_name}

Unfortunately, setting up a repository with that path in svnX results in the follow error when trying to connect:

Hmm… how to press the ‘p’ key in a dialog? Turns out the trick is to accept the certificate by using the normal svn command first:

svn list https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/redshed

Up comes the warning:

Error validating server certificate for 'https://svn.sourceforge.net:443':
- The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
Certificate information:
- Hostname: *.sourceforge.net
- Valid: from Dec 8 13:40:07 2005 GMT until Feb 7 13:40:07 2007 GMT
- Issuer: Equifax Secure Certificate Authority, Equifax, US
- Fingerprint: 49:b8:cb:87:04:8c:49:39:45:83:dd:4c:cf:c7:54:57:b0:9e:84:5d
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently? p

Now you can press ‘p’ to accept the certificate, at which point the list command shows the familiar listing:

branches/
tags/
trunk/

Now that the certificate has been accepted, you can go back to svnX and connect to the repository in all its GUI goodness.