See issue 695. The current implementation of svn checkout -N is quite broken. It results in a working copy which has missing entries, yet is ignorant of its "incompleteness". Apparently a whole bunch of CVS users are fairly dependent on this paradigm, but none of the Subversion developers were. For now, there's really no workaround other than to change your process: try checking out separate subdirectories of the repository and manually nesting your working copies.

Answered by M P , an ibibo Master, at 7:16 PM on October 06, 2008