I was trying out a plugin in my Ruby on Rails application and decided not to use it. Apparently, when I installed the plugin, a reference to it was added to my subversion repository. Since the reference was not to a working directory, my capistrano deployments got debackled and died. Here is how you can remove external repositories from subversion.

If you get a message like this one when you are working with subversion:

Fetching external item into 'vendor/plugins/...'

Change directories so that you are in the root of your Rails application and issue the following command:

svn propedit svn:externals vendor/plugins

A list of the external plugins will appear in your default editor. Mine is vim. Delete the link that you no longer want, save the file and commit your changes.