Anything better than externals for migrating CVS server-side symlinks?

We are currently migrating from CVS to Subversion. On CVS, we heavily
use server-side symbolic links in order to share files among several
projects within a single repository. What's the best way of replicating
such setup with Subversion?

I know about externals, but that is lacks a lot of features that were
present in CVS's setup:

1) Currently externals have to be specified with a full URL (hopefully
issue 1336 that asks for relative paths will be implemented soon). We
are currently planning to use http:// for read-only anonymous access and
svn+ssh for developers. This makes it impossible to specify externals in
such a way that would work both for anonymous people and for developers.

2) Externals are too separated from the rest of repository. We want to
be able to do an "svn commit" and have both the main project and the
shared stuff to be committed together (preferably in a single shared
transaction - after all the two are a part of the same repository).

3) Only directory-level sharing (not a big deal compared to (2) ).

Is there any way to get all of this with subversion? Are there any plans
for providing something like this in the future?

TIA for any information.

-- 
Aleksey Nogin
Home Page: http://nogin.org/
E-Mail: nogin@cs.caltech.edu (office), aleksey@nogin.org (personal)
Office: Moore 04, tel: (626) 395-2200
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