With CVS's pserver, you are required to б╚loginб╩ to the server before any read or write operationБ─■you even have to login for anonymous operations. With a Subversion repository using Apache httpd or svnserve as the server, you don't provide any authentication credentials at the outsetБ─■if an operation that you perform requires authentication, the server will challenge you for your credentials (whether those credentials are username and password, a client certificate, or even both). So if your repository is world-readable, you will not be required to authenticate at all for read operations.
As with CVS, Subversion still caches your credentials on
disk (in your ~/.subversion/auth/
directory) unless you tell it not to by using the
--no-auth-cache
switch.
The exception to this behavior, however, is in the case of
accessing an svnserve server over an SSH
tunnel, using the svn+ssh://
URL schema. In
that case, the ssh program unconditionally
demands authentication just to start the tunnel.