Are subversion externals an antipattern?

Question

Subversion lets you embed working copies of other repositories using externals, allowing easy version control of third-party library software in your project.

While

Answer 1

I don't think this is an anti-pattern at all. I did a few quick searches on google and came up with basically nothing... nobody is complaining that using svn:externals is bad or harmful. Of course there are some caveats that you have to be aware of... and it's not something that you should just sprinkle heavily into all of your repositories... but as for the original quotation, that's just his personal (and subjective) opinion. He never really discussed svn:externals, except to condemn them as an anti-pattern. Such sweeping statements without any support or at least reasoning as to how the person came to make the statement are always suspect.

That said, there are some issues with using externals. Like Mike answered, they can be very helpful for pointing to stable branches of released software... especially software that you already control. We use them internally in a number of projects for utility libraries and such. We have a small group that enhances and works on the utility library base, but that base code is shared across a number of projects. We don't want various teams just checking in utility project code and we don't want to deal with a million branches, so for us svn:externals works very well. For some people, they may not be the answer. However, I would strongly disagree with the statement "Please don't use..." and that these tools represent an anti-pattern.