There are a number of posts (e.g. here, and here, not to mention the official documentation) which ask/explain how to perform a sparse checkout, but I don't see any post on how to query the depth of a folder or a series of folders.
Is there anyway to ask Subversion, "what was the depth setting passed to svn update --set-depth?" on a folder?
svn info will tell you. Here's a directory updated with svn update --set-depth=files:
> svn info "C:\path\to\directory"
Path: C:\path\to\directory
Working Copy Root Path: C:\path
URL: http://svn.example.com/path/to/directory
Relative URL: ^/path/to/directory
Repository Root: http://svn.example.com/path
Repository UUID: 3183f4db-b256-8143-8013-6b50bc517e3e
Revision: 4860
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Depth: files
Last Changed Author: abc
Last Changed Rev: 1234
Last Changed Date: 2014-12-09 14:52:55 -0500 (Tue, 09 Dec 2014)
The line Depth: files indicates the update depth. When the depth is infinity, this line is just missing. Otherwise, it will be one of "empty", "files", or "immediates" (those listed in the help for svn update).
Note that for sparse checkouts, it will be empty because sparse checkouts don't really map to any of the other values.