Another sad software story, with a happy ending.

• pushmi provides a read/write mirror of an svn repository.

• My repository is svn+ssh://, which normally works fine with ssh-agent.

• Unfortunately pushmi relies on svn hooks to update the master repository, and svn in its wisdom does not preserve any environment variables, thus making ssh-agent not work very well.

• A solution is to install the package keychain, which writes the ssh-agent environment variables out to disk (this sounds trivial, but it also finds the running ssh-agent without any configuration).

• to both $REPOSITORY/hooks/pre-commit and $REPOSITORY/hooks/post-commit, add the following snippet to the beginning of the script

    KEYCHAINFILE=/home/bremner/.keychain/`hostname`-sh
    if [ -f $KEYCHAINFILE ]; then
      . $KEYCHAINFILE
    fi
  

• You might need to adjust the path if you are not me.

• UPDATED You need the option --inherit local or --inherit all to keychain to get it to overwrite the previous version of its files.