Currently using WUU (WUU - WoW UI Updater) to update my addons and have found it to be a little slow. Also cannot figure out how to enable WOWACE Tools to delete my duplicate external libraries.

I'd also quite like to clean my WTF folder of settings for old unused mods, am sure there's a better solution. Any ideas on that one either?

Thanks Joetest, I don't completely understand why it's a bad thing to update every WOWACE mod with externals. Does it take more memory? Is it true that I'll have duplicate libraries loaded, for example?

When you go to "external" mode for Ace addons, the Libraries are put as stand-alone versions and are being loaded just like normal addons. Clever updaters (and jwowupdater is not the only one that can do this) see that and remove the libraries that are included with addons).

If they would not do this what would happen is this: A library gets loaded and registers itself. This may have been happening as part of a non-externalized Addon or by the Library being loaded as standalone library.

Each addon that is externalized will get this library and not try to load it again.

Each addon that is non-externalized has the addon included in its directory structure and referenced. The game's lua interpreter will seek and find the code, compile it and run it. The library code just processed starts to run, notices that the library is already loaded quits. You now have a bit of overhead because the game loaded duplicate code that didn't do anything.

So what you gain by externalizing is a little bit of loading time speedup. It's the more valuable the more ace addons you use.

What is bad in any case is mix and match arbitrarily. An old addon copied into your interface folder may wreak havoc, if it includes a way older library that gets load first. A subsequent addon may then load a newer library which will replace the older one, but that may break the old addon horribly which expects the old library. The point is, either externalize all your ace addons or none. Then chances of something breaking should be minimal.

Overall there's really no huge benefit for having external libs or not, it's all down to small amounts of load time gains and things of that nature. Honestly I let my updater make external libs but it does look messy.

Nice constructive answer...