Best practice for setting up vcs roots?

I have my source code in subversion in the traditional trunk/tags/branches folder structure. I see two options setting up checkouts:

1. Create the vcs root to point to the root /svn folder and then (somehow) be able to get the files in trunk for regular checkouts.
2. Create the vcs root to point to the /svn/trunk folder and check out as normal.

The issues I see with #2 I see is that I have to a) create a different root if I want to access the /tags or /branches folders (or do I?) and b) is it easy to traverse up the tree when doing something like tagging?

With #1 a checkout would normally grab everything so you would end up with all your branches and tags which doesn't seem right.

Thanks.