managing inter project(s) dependencies

Have a question about managing inter project(s) dependencies. Have used subversion in a company for several years in very big digital ASIC designs/projects. The way we handled dependencies between release entities was inplace before we started to use subversion and we didn't bother to change it. Now I don't work there anymore and am presented with the task of understanding how it could be handled "inside" subversion.

I have read about svn:externals and it don't think it solves my complete problem even if it is pretty.

A very common issue, in my experience,  that arises when integrating a design is that a module A fails to work ( fails compile,link,syntesize, pass unit or regression tests etc) because, module A depends on module B and C. Module B and C depends on module D.  But B and C was released using different versions of D. Versions that are incompatible with each other. When I talk to people this seems to be a much more common problem in hardware development world that in in the software development world. Cant really understand why..

The solution I used is to have file or perhaps svn:properties in each release entity, which states which release entities it depends on and on what version of those it was pointing to when a release was made.

Now you can check out any entity and make a little script that parses that file recursively. Then it can give a warning that B and C depends on different versions of D. Easy.

Are there any support for that built in to subversion? Are there any standard solution?  Somewhere the issue are discussed?

Regards
Andreas Lindh