I'm developing a project which uses simplesamlphp. I'm developing, among other things, a custom authsource. It would be great if I can create a project in my own SVN server that uses simplesamlphp as an svn external, so I can easily keep up to date with simplesamlphp's development.

This is currently not possible because all modules, metadata and configurations are always stored in a subdir of simplesamlphp; it would be great if this could be externalized to directories outside of the main simplesamlphp directory, so an svn external can easily do a drop in of simplesamlphp into an existing svn project.

Can this not be solved by simply first checking out simplesamlphp, and then checking out your module in the correct location?

Another alternative (if you are using linux), is to create a symlink from the modules directory to the module in your own repository.

That's what I'm doing now; the nice thing about svn externals though is that with one checkout everything is in its right place, which makes deployment for other team members (and scenarios that include a continuous integration environment) easier.

This would also be helpful when packaging simpleSAMLphp, instead of creating symlinks in /usr/share/simplesamlphp.

For metadata it would be possible to configure this in config/config.php, but the location of the config directory cannot be specified there (in itself) ;) I guess that would require patching simpleSAMLphp when packaging it to point to /etc/simplesamlphp...

Closing the issue here, moved to:

https://github.com/simplesamlphp/simplesamlphp/issues/27