Help in understanding SVN Externals

Question

I\'m looking into svn externals for my company, and it seems like it would be a good feature for us to use. We have several products that often reference shared components,

Answer 1

You can use date specifiers to ensure you get corresponding revisions when you update.

We've done it for a tool that runs PC-Lint; we like to run it on each revision so that we can diff the results.

It's a bit obnoxious in its implementation -- we:

• determine what rev the working copy is at (using svnversion)
• determine what rev the HEAD is at (using svn info)
• grab the timestamps for all revisions up to and including head (using svn log)
• bump the timestamps by .999 seconds to be "sure" we get the rev (yay magic!)
• update to each revision (using svn update -r {sometimestamp})
• run PC-Lint on the working copy, diff, mailout, trigger klaxons, whatever

(Complexity worthy of Rube Goldberg, isn't it? Upvotes and undying gratitude for anyone who can suggest a better solution.)

You may also be interested in the svn book's section on Peg and Operative Revisions, which I've just discovered -- this seems to be a relatively new addition.