Currently it seems that SVN checkout version can be only set as part of the global settings, however when more than one nodes are being used, the build slaves can end up using different SVN versions quite easily (personally I'm suffering from the SVN 1.6 <-> 1.7 incompatibilities), so it is possible to actually check out in 1.7 format on a slave, where locally only 1.6 is available and then build scripts are failing to execute SVN commands (i.e. through Makefiles). It should be possible to either set checkout version on a slave basis, or maybe even per build job.