[Ruby] advice on externals and developing plugins

[ben wiseley]

For my acts_as_tsearch plugin (which I've finally got unit tests around -
thanks for the help!) I'm not sure how to best use SVN with RubyForge or
GoogleCode.

When developing I need this plugin in a project to do anything meaningful
with it.  So, with our companies svn I just do an external, and edit it like
normal code.  But I'm not allowed to open up our SVN.

With Google Code, to have r+w you need to do a
svn checkout https://acts-as-tsearch.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/acts-as-tsearch
--username wiseleyb

With RubyForge it's similar - but uses svn+ssh

Neither of these seem to work with externals.

So what's the best way to do this?  To have an update-able external?  I
looked into using Piston
http://www.rubyinside.com/advent2006/12-piston.htmlbut I'm not sure
how that'd work with Capistrano.

How are other people doing this?

-ben