I’ve been using wordpress since the early 2.x releases. One thing that used to get me down was having to apply all the updates to wordpress as they were especially frequent in 2.x release. While wordpress has an automatic update option now, it only uses FTP or SFTP. I only use SCP over SSH myself for uploading and storing files to my VPS.
SVN however provides a very easy method to install and update your wordpress blog. While there are SVN applications such as tortise svn, I do a lot of SVN using the CLI.
Initial Install of WordPress
mkdir ~/public_blog cd public_blog svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.1.1 .
Update WordPress from SVN to the latest version
cd ~/public_blog svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.1.2 .
Notes
If you want to see the latest available version of wordpress, browse directly to http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/Then if there is a later version available use the svn switch (sw) command above.
Further Information
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing/Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Subversion
http://mark-kirby.co.uk/2008/how-to-install-wordpress-using-ssh-and-svn/