I've some SVN directories with svn:externals references to files and folders in the same repository like that:

^/trunk/Ivy-Common/ivysettings.xml ivysettings.xml
^/trunk/Components/src src
^/trunk/components/test-src test-src

The Jenkins SCM polling detects changes in the external directories (^/trunk/Components/src / ^/trunk/Components/test-src) properly, but does not detect changes of the external file (ivysettings.xml). The files are not listed in scm-polling.log nor svnexternals.txt, but they're properly checked out / updated when triggering the job manually or by other SVN changes.

As I use svn:externals to distribute some common files to lots of projects, the only workaround is to trigger them all manually ...