We set all externals at the root level (trunk) of our svn tree. This is so all externals are easily found both manually and programmatically without recursion of all folders. On our trunk folder we have the svn:external set similar to the following:

https://svn.foo.com/bar/bin lib/bar
https://svn.foo.com/web/scripts/baz src/web/scripts/baz

When Jenkin's svn module does a build with the "Emulate clean ..." option set, the lib/bar folder is not removed, however the src/web/scripts/baz folder is. When the svn update is called, the folder is brought back down. We have several large externals that are having this problem causing our builds to take a long time due to the unnecessary removal and re-download of the external files.

It would be great if all external folders were left alone.

Thanks