Oye meta, me parece muy extraño lo que comentas sobre el SVN de wordpress, en mi caso justo actualicé un sitio y todo fue muy rápido:
Código:
# svn info
Path: .
URL: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/3.1
Repository Root: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress
Repository UUID: 1a063a9b-81f0-0310-95a4-ce76da25c4cd
Revision: 17843
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: dd32
Last Changed Rev: 17807
Last Changed Date: 2011-05-04 23:54:19 -0600 (Wed, 04 May 2011)
[~/www]# date
Thu May 26 15:18:35 CST 2011
[~/www]# svn up
U wp-login.php
U wp-app.php
U wp-includes/default-filters.php
U wp-includes/taxonomy.php
U wp-includes/ms-files.php
U wp-includes/post.php
U wp-includes/version.php
U wp-includes/theme.php
U wp-includes/functions.php
U wp-includes/class-wp-xmlrpc-server.php
U wp-includes/query.php
U wp-includes/formatting.php
U wp-includes/canonical.php
U wp-includes/class-oembed.php
U wp-includes/meta.php
U readme.html
U wp-admin/network.php
U wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
U wp-admin/includes/post.php
U wp-admin/includes/update-core.php
U wp-admin/includes/import.php
U wp-admin/includes/template.php
U wp-admin/includes/media.php
U wp-admin/ms-delete-site.php
U wp-admin/custom-header.php
U wp-admin/network/upgrade.php
U wp-admin/press-this.php
U wp-admin/css/nav-menu.css
U wp-admin/css/nav-menu.dev.css
U wp-admin/custom-background.php
U .
Fetching external item into 'wp-content/plugins/akismet'
Updated external to revision 389527.
Updated to revision 18059.
[~/www]# date
Thu May 26 15:18:50 CST 2011
Quizás tu servidor está peleando con los de Automattic :P