Setting up repositories

[RossMCormier]

I don't think this is the right place to ask this question, but I 
can't really think of a better source.

I have a 'shared' code base that 3-4 other projects will use.  I 
envisioned the following directory structure:

shared
  |-java src tree

Project1
  |-java src tree
  |
  |-shared (this is a symbolic link on the server to shared)
      |-java src tree
    
Project2
  |-java src tree
  |
  |-shared (this is a symbolic link on the server to shared)
      |-java src tree

Does this setup pass a sanity check?  

Here is a little problem.  I would like to allow each project's trunk 
to work with a different tagged 'shared'.  Can I set a default tag to 
use on the shared directory?  The developers work on the trunk in 
each of the projects, so I would like to make it transparent that the 
shared tree is NOT latest version of the shared, but a tagged 
version.  

I could have them manually update the shared portion of the tree via 
tag, but there is user training involved and they could forget to do 
this after an initial checkout, and thus get compiler errors because 
the shared code has been modified significantly, but the project has 
not decided to accept the latest version of shared.

I hope this makes some sense.

Thanks in advance,
Ross