Michael Marcin wrote:
I'd just like to mention again that I've had lots of subtle issues with externals and I think they should be discouraged or forbidden.
Not the least of which is that if you are planning to move to a system that involves lots of merges, branching, and tagging all the externals must be branched and updated individually or they will point to the same unbranched location.
There is a contrib script called "svncopy" which does the same thing as "svn copy", but with some extra flags for managing externals in the appropriate ways for branching and tagging. It's not a great solution but it is better than doing it manually.
If the repository URL ever changes then all internal externals must be updated by hand.
I have been able to use svn-controlled symlinks rather than "internal externals". But presumably this is not portable to Windows. I suggest that externals should be considered a mechanism of last resort. Phil.