It would be an extremely useful feature to be able to only do an svn checkout of the trunk code in multi-module projects using some kind of wildcard path or regular expression (for example "parent/**/trunk").

The problem here is that as time goes on there are more and more release tags of modules which require a longer time to checkout. The checked out folders for branches and tags also represent wasted effort as usually only the trunk is being built in a CI environment.

It would be possible to checkout modules individually but this creates a higher maintenance overhead when modules are added or removed. In the case of common source libraries there can be ten, twenty or even fifty modules. A real life working case requires about 30 minutes of time just to do the svn checkout. It is also possible to do an svn update but in practice it has been found that this does not remove unversioned files from the build and in some cases has left version controlled files in the workspace when they have been removed from the server.

Parent

ModuleA -> trunk
-> branches -> branch 1
-> branch 2
-> tags -> 1.0.0
-> 2.0.0
ModuleB -> trunk
-> branches -> branch 1
-> branch 2
-> tags -> 1.0.0
-> 2.0.0