Quirk with svn:ignore

I ran into an unexpected behavior with svn:ignore today and wanted to see
if someone can verify whether this is a bug (in the current version) or
just an aspect of how Subversion works. We're still on 1.6x.

Given a tree with

trunk
   + cache
   + htdocs
   + logs
   + system

I have tried putting

cd trunk
svn propset svn:ignore logs/* .

...ignore everything in the *logs* directory, but the svn:ignore propset is
on *trunk*.
 This doesn't work -- that is, log files are not ignored as expected, but
shown as new files when running the project and svn status

However,

cd logs
svn propset svn:ignore * .

...setting svn:ignore * on logs, works.

For what it's worth, externals works fine this way, e.g.

cd trunk
svn propset svn:externals some/arbitrary/directory
http://svn-server/repo/folder .

// some/arbitrary/directory is created from the externally referenced
svn-server/repo/folder as expected

We were hoping to set all our externals and ignores on the trunk level
rather than sprinkling them throughout our project, but it doesn't seem
possible.

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