Short and sweet:
I have one project with an external, which allows me to commit changes to files in that external alongside changes to the main trunk in one operation:
I have another project with an external, which does not allow me to commit changes alongside the main trunk:
The most obvious difference is that the second external is checked out to a compound directory, but other than that I cannot find a difference that would, to miy mind, be preventing SVN from committing everything together.
What’s going on here? Obviously I want to be able to commit changes to externals along with the changes to the trunk in one operation. How can I make this happen in the second case?
The answer turned out to be the compound directory. For some reason, externals checked out to a subfolder immediately under the root project, like “SharedLib”, can have changes committed, no matter how much deeper the changes actually are. Externals checked out to a folder structure like “Externals/SharedLib” cannot. That also means that externals checked out from various sources into a single subdirectory (to avoid having to get an entire external when you only need one library) won’t allow commits.
I’ll make do. Now that I know it’s an issue I’ll adjust how externals are set up when I want to actually work with them and not just have them around.