Subversion (svn) authentication fails

Problem

When subversion client fails to authenticate printing error messages like:

Password for '(null)' GNOME keyring:
svn: OPTIONS of 'https://vcs.service.rug.nl/svn/example-repo':
authorization failed: Could not authenticate to server:
rejected Basic challenge (https://vcs.service.rug.nl)

The cause of this problem is that subversion is trying to use the gnome-keyring deamon to get a username and password. There are to known ways to prevent this and thus solve the problem:

Solution #1

Edit the file ~/.subversion/config and under the section [auth] make sure there is a line that reads (note: nothing after the '=' symbol):

password-stores =

Solution #2

Disable the "keyring" which subversion is trying to use:

rm ~/.gnome2/keyrings/login.keyring