If you are using subversion over an SSH connection and it just sits there rather than prompting for a password, and when you press Ctrl+C you then see the password prompt but then immediately quits with an error, this may be due to gnome-keyring waiting for you to enter the password in a GUI prompt that will never display. After a long time (a minute or more?) it will finally offer to read the password from the terminal.

While Subversion is sitting there doing nothing, try ps -C gcr-prompter. If you see it running while subversion is in limbo, then this is probably what's happening for you.

The solution I found was to edit ~/.subversion/config and set the password-stores entry to be blank, i.e.,:

password-stores =

I imagine also configuring X11 Forwarding so that you would see the GUI prompt pop-up would also work, but I have not tried that because I do not want a GUI prompt; I prefer a CLI prompt.