Managing svn:externals that are tags?

Question

I am fairly new to SVN - I have access to a repository where the trunk contains some user-defined libraries. These libraries are listed under /tags and the svn:externals property of the trunk includes the path to the /tag versions of these files. However, these libraries also exist as files in the trunk itself - so I was wondering which version of these libraries is referenced by the rest of the code, the tags or the copies in the trunk? If both copies were the same, would I be safe deleting the copies in the trunk and leaving the svn:externals reference? What would be the "proper" way to manage this code? (I am using TortoiseSVN) Thanks~

Answer 1

So I asked someone who knows a lot more about SVN than I do and I think I figured it out:

When you reference an external in TortoiseSVN, it appears to "include" the file in the same directory (the trunk in my case), even though that file is located under /tag. If you use the repo-browser, you can see that the included file actually points to the tag location.

The proper procedure is not to modify the tag from within the trunk, but to modify the tag at its original location, create a new tag, and update the svn:externals with the new tag.