programming is hard

To get around this problem, you can setup per host SSH settings. To do this, open ~/.ssh/config and at the end add the lines 
Host svn.yourserver.com 
User jdoe 
This makes it so that everytime I connect to svn.yourserver.com with SSH, it will automatically use the username jdoe instead of my unix username. 

If you are prompted for a private key password 

This will look something like: 
Enter passphrase for key '/home/jdoe/.ssh/id_dsa': 
To get around this you can either setup ssh-agent to cache this password or you can simply turn off the password on your private key. To do the latter, simply type: 
ssh-keygen -t dsa -p 
and follow the prompts, and when it prompts for a new passphrase, simply hit enter.