I actually shy away from using SVN's update to push files to production or development; primary reason is I don't like my entire code history sitting in my publ

I actually shy away from using SVN's update to push files to production or development; primary reason is I don't like my entire code history sitting in my public root... Generally, I prefer rsync. Rsync can exclude all of the .svn directories so you are pushing the latest working copy and it also only pushes files that are new or have been changed on the source machine. You can easily write up a little deployment script that you run when you are ready and up you go; it does many of the same things (exception being delete) that Subversion's update command does for you. Because I use rsync with a shell (rather than it's daemon process), I generally have a passwordless private key to the server so rsync can run without constantly asking me to authenticate.