Automatic subversion update

Hi folks,

i put all wordpress installations in one sub-directory for easy updating and every night a cron job is running executing this little script:

for filename in ./*
do
if [ ${filename:(-4):99} != ".txt" ]; then
  svn up $filename/
fi

done;

(there are some txt files i have to ignore thats why the if statement exists)

When a new stable release is coming i run this script:

for filename in ./*
do
if [ ${filename:(-4):99} != ".txt" ]; then
  svn sw https://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.6.1/ $filename/
fi
done;

Now thats nice but i’m a lazy one and love dry (don’t repeat yourself). So every time a new stable release is coming i don’t won’t to update my switch script.

How can the script get to know that a new version is available? (There must be a function in wordpress but i didn’t found it.)

Does wordpress also warns for plugin incompatibility?

Did anybody did something similar or do you know any improvements?

regards Volkan