How is includeexternal supposed to work?

It would seem to suffer from a lot of edge cases & very little error reporting. If the file included has a workspace of its own there's no error & you end up with an empty work space. We have a master file which goes through a project sub folder looking for premake.lua files. If it finds one it's run with dofile(), these in themselves can have a workspace and reference other premake files from which they want to reference projects. I've found no setup which can easily generate a master workspace with all projects, and workspaces which references these projects. It would be sweet if projects could have multiple workspace parents instead of trying to process the files multiple times & getting the external tags working.

Start at the includeexternal behavior and reproduce the described setup: a master premake.lua using dofile() to load project subfolders, including files with their own workspaces and references. Compare the resulting workspaces with the requested master-and-child workspace relationships; done should include defined behavior for these cases and useful error reporting.