How to structure nested releases?

I'd like to make releases of systems, components and subcomponents.
I'll try to explain my self in a concise manner, but perhaps it makes
the questions incomprehensible.

A system release contains (among other things) selected component
releases (different systems contains different selections of
components from a large component base).

A component release contains selected subcomponent releases.

1) Should all systems, components and subcomponents be located in
parallel directories (ie on the same directory level)? Or is it
feasible to let the subcomponents be released inside their components?

2) If I copy component releases into a system trunk, will I then be
able to (easily) see which component releases I've copied? I don't
want the release numbers of the components/subcomponents to be part of
the checked out structure. Can the release numbers be visible in the
svn structure, without being a part of the checked out structure?

I think my problem is close to how mingw looks:
http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml#hdr2

It seems that consistent use of externals might do most of what I
want, but in that case:
3) Is it possible to make an atomic feature commit in several
subcomponents in one system? Will the externals break the commit, even
though they are referring to the same repository?

4) Is there any kind of support for questions like: "Is there a newer
release of any of the subcomponents of the components that are
included in my system?"?

Hoping to make sense...

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Received on Thu May 17 22:19:06 2007