Shared components throughout all projects, is there a better alternative than svn:externals?

Question

My situation: I have several components, which sometimes have changes to them, and are shared across a lot of different projects. Each project puts these in a subfolder ca

Answer 1

I stated this on a similar question: You should use svn:externals as external references from different repositories. So svn:externals should refer to components, modules, 3rd party tools, etc. which reside in different repositories.

You should not use svn:externals to emulate a "symbolic link"-behaviour by using externals to point into the same repository.

You can solve such issues most of the time by modifying your build-structure, or use checkout-scripts and sparse checkout feature.

svn:externals have a lot of problems most of them are difficult to see, track and repair: see an example here

• commits cannot span over externals(no atomic commits)
• branches will not branch their externals
• tags will not "freeze" their externals so latter builds may result in different/broken builds
• merging and reeintegrate merge will not work on externals

If you use externals to point to other repositories, you will most of the time do not have these problems.