[development] Can I move the sites and profiles directories?

[Dave Cohen]

I'd like to separate my work from core Drupal.  As of 5.x, Drupal supports the 
sites/all directory, where I can put my modules and themes.  And that's a 
great step in the right direction.

However, to make my source code more manageable, I'd like my sites and 
profiles to be outside the Drupal directory.  Without going into too much 
detail, this will allow me to manage my code with svn's externals property.

So today my directory structure looks something like this:

www/drupal-5.1/index.php
www/drupal-5.1/sites/
www/drupal-5.1/profiles/
www/drupal-5.1/[lots of other things]

And what I'd like is something like:

www/drupal-5.1/index.php
www/sites/
www/profiles/
www/drupal-5.1/[lots of other things]

The trick then would be to get Drupal to find my sites and profiles 
directories.  Is my only option to hack core?  Any other suggestions?

Note that I don't want to set up symbolic links from www/drupal-5.1/sites to 
my sites directories.  I have my code (including the drupal core I am using) 
in subversion, and I'd like to checkout out an entire site in a single step.  
Having to replace Drupal's sites and profiles directories with symbolic links 
is an extra step I'd like to avoid. 

Thanks in advance for any help,

-Dave