New on his blog today Vid Luther talks about deploying WordPress using Ruby (specifically Capistrano) to manage the build and deployment of you web applications.
One of the best deployment systems out there (imho), is by the Ruby community, and it's called Capistrano. We've been using it internally since this summer to manage and deploy our Symfony application with great success. I'll be sharing the methodology to "Capify" a Symfony project soon, but first I wanted to share the Wordpress-Capistrano project.
The project's currently hosted on github where you can download it and try it out for yourself. Most of his recopies should be commented out but be sure to check before running any sort of deployment.