First, install WordPress from a Subversion checkout; do:

$ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6/

instead of downloading the .zip or .tar.gz file. Configure as directed.

Then, when a new version is available, log into your webhost and run:

$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.1/

from your install directory.

Done.

Note that you can also do something similar (but an order of magnitude more complex, at least for my brain) using git and git-svn if you want to version your local settings as well. Perhaps one day Asheesh or I will get that written up.

Last week I was looking at the “upcoming features”:http://subversion.tigris.org/roadmap.html in Subversion 1.5. “Asheesh”:http://asheesh.org/note/ had pointed out the “merge tracking”:http://subversion.tigris.org/merge-tracking/ feature, which sounded lovely. And it probably will be. The thing I discovered, though, is that you can get it today in the form of “svnmerge”:http://www.orcaware.com/svn/wiki/Svnmerge.py.

svnmerge allows you to track what revisions you’ve merged from a branch (or trunk), block certain revisions (features you might not want to deploy just yet), and performs the merges for you when that time arrives (including generating a nice commit message containing all the log messages you’re merging; handy). I spent an hour yesterday and an hour today getting the merges recorded for the packages I’m currently working on, and it already feels better. No more wondering if I remembered to merge something; just svnmerge avail and see if anything shows up.

Sure, it’ll be great to get this feature into the core application (and an interactive mode ala “darcs”:http://darcs.net would be slick, too), but to paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara, “with god as my witness, I will never svn merge again”.