OpenSSH ControlMaster and Subversion

OpenSSH has a fantastic feature called ControlMaster. Basically this option allows you to create a socket that will share your already opened ssh session to the same host. To enable this option for all you put the following snippet in your $HOME/.ssh/config after creating something like $HOME/.ssh/sockets:

Host *
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/%r@%h:%p

For every username@host:port it will create a socket in $HOME/.ssh/sockets. The only problem is that current Subversion (1.4.6 on my FreeBSD box) cannot work well with control sockets when using the svn+ssh:// URI identifier. In order to work around this problem you can add a specific host before the wildcard entry, for example:

Host svn.example.com
  ControlMaster no

Host *
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/%r@%h:%p

Of course, doing it like this is a bit tedious for every Subversion repository you use in this manner. Thankfully there is another way to do this. In $HOME/.subversion/config there is a section called [tunnels]. If you add the following entry to that section it will disable the ControlMaster:

[tunnels]
ssh = ssh -o ControlMaster=no