To run Subversion over SSH, you basically need a shell on the target system and a subversion repository located there which is created following the description above. The repository must be configured for access by the system users of the remote system.

Assuming that your user name on the client system is the same as on the server side, there is not much to configure. Just change the protocol specification from file:// to svn+ssh://remoteusername@server-hostname in all examples showed in this manual.

Note that during svn-buildpackage tools actions a lot of SSH calls can be made and so the user is asked for his login data. The regular method to deal with that is using an SSH key authentication method together with ssh-agent and ssh-add to cache the passphrase in memory. Another approach, which also brings a significant speed boost, is using a cached SSH connection. This can be done with a new feature of OpenSSH (see GCC SSH connection caching howto) or a third-party tool like fsh.

If you wish to use fsh over ssh you could specify a custom transport method in the subversion configuration. To do so, edit the file ~/.subversion/config and add the section [tunnels] to it, following by your custom transport definition. Example:

# personal subversion config with custom ssh tunnel command
[tunnels]
# SSH account on svn.d.o
# compression is enabled in the ssh config
deb = fsh -l <user>
# SSH account for NQ intranet, set fix username
nq = ssh -C -l zomb

You can use the new defined tunnels in a similar ways as described above but replace svn+ssh with svn+tunnelname, so the final URL looks like:

svn+deb://svn.debian.org/svn/myproject/ourpackage/trunk