I use Eclipse Juno with Subclipse (mostly for LaTeX authoring and C delevlopment). In some of my SVN projects I need to use external repositories, which I want to do by using the svn:externals property.
After adding this property (using subclipse) to my repository and committing, I do not get any of the desired external sources imported to my local working copy after an svn update from within Eclipse. Neither I get any external sources if I do an svn update from the command line in this directory.
However, when I checkout the same repository to another directory, the behaviour is as expected. After adding an external property, it is sufficient to do a commit and afterwards a check out to make svn import the external repository.
Why is the local working copy, which was checked out by subclipse behaving so weird?
You could try using the Update … option that brings up a dialog and then use the options to make sure the working copy has been set to be Fully recursive. This is the default behavior but maybe somehow you got a “sparse working copy”.
As noted in the comment above, all of the work and logic is handled by SVN itself internally. Which is probably why you saw the same behavior when using the SVN command line client. I would expect Subclipse and the CLI to be consistent as they both are using the same libraries to do all the work.
Otherwise, I would just say the devil is in the details. Would probably need to see a lot more information about your working copy to know what is wrong.
If you are not already, I would recommend using Subclipse 1.8.x