Could that title get any longer !
Hopefully you get the point, sometimes you need different tools for different jobs, if you want a full development platform with SVN support I suggest you take a look at eclipse (with subclipse ) but what if you already have done the development and you just want to do a quick upload.
My phpbb_recent_topics plugin is hosted here, and when the nice guys at wordpress gave me an svn account, I just wanted a quick way to upload what I've done. Now I must stress this may not be the "proper" way to use svn (there's a book for that) but it is enough to achieve what we want, a straight forward upload.
I'm using redhat, so the 1st step was to install dag's subversion rpm , I also needed to setup an "editor" variable for commenting.
SVN_EDITOR=vi
export SVN_EDITOR
Then, I went into a directory onto my server, and downloaded a copy of the existing subversion directory structure.
[nick@SERVER wp_plugins]$ svn checkout https://svn.wp-plugins.org/phpbb-recent-topics/
A phpbb-recent-topics/trunk
A phpbb-recent-topics/branches
A phpbb-recent-topics/tags
Checked out revision 9232.
[nick@SERVER wp_plugins]$
My plugin (at the time) was on version 1, so my 1st steps were to create a version 1 tag, add it to svn, get the stable copy of my plugin, add that to svn.
[nick@SERVER wp_plugins]$ cd phpbb-recent-topics/
[nick@SERVER phpbb-recent-topics]$ ls
branches tags trunk
[nick@SERVER phpbb-recent-topics]$ cd tags/
[nick@SERVER tags]$ mkdir 0.1
[nick@SERVER tags]$ cd ..
[nick@SERVER wp_plugins]$ svn add phpbb-recent-topics/tags/*
A phpbb-recent-topics/tags/0.1
[nick@SERVER wp_plugins]$ cd phpbb-recent-topics/tags/0.1/
[nick@SERVER 0.1]$ wget https://www.linickx.com/files/php/phpbb_recent_topics.txt
[nick@SERVER 0.1]$ mv phpbb_recent_topics.txt phpbb_recent_topics.php
[nick@SERVER 0.1]$ svn add phpbb_recent_topics.php
A phpbb_recent_topics.php
[nick@SERVER 0.1]$
Finally I updated everything, and uploaded (committed) my files.
[nick@SERVER 0.1]$ cd ../../../
[nick@SERVER wp_plugins]$ svn update phpbb-recent-topics/
At revision 9232.
[nick@SERVER wp_plugins]$ svn --username linickx commit phpbb-recent-topics/
Adding phpbb-recent-topics/tags/0.1
Adding phpbb-recent-topics/tags/0.1/phpbb_recent_topics.php
Transmitting file data .......
Committed revision 9233.
[nick@SERVER wp_plugins]$
Remember this doesn't publish your plugin on wordpress.org, to do that you need a valid readme.txt in the trunk directory, but as you can see once you've created all the files on your local box, it's just a few commands to get your work uploaded.
Did you notice that the wordpress svn supports SSL ?