in my opinion, subversion fails to properly support many features it claims to support. when people find that some things do not work as advertised by design, people naturally get pissed.

for example, subversion claims to do path-based authorization. we found that it only works when not using repository-wide branches/tags. when one wants to assign different rights to different users on different parts of a project, and also wants to tag the whole project, the policy file needs to be adjusted accordingly for the new branch.

so the best way to do it is to hold these parts on separate repositories, which breaks subversion's main selling point over cvs. so one defines svn:externals, which in turn needs to be updated for every branch/tag with revision numbers.

and this is a just minor annoyance in the whole stinking pile of mess that is branching/merging in subversion.