Is the built-in updater the “best” way to upgrade WP installations?

With the release of WordPress 3.1, I’m about to update my own WP installation. I’ve had a thought about the different ways one can do the update: by hand (ugh), via Subversion checkout on the server, and using the built-in updater.

To this point I’ve used the SVN route, not sure why, possibly that was from before WP added the auto-update feature. It’s a minor hassle though, as I have to log in to the server and run svn up to get the new release – admittedly that’s not a big deal, but it’s an extra step over logging into WP to apply the update.

I would imagine that the WP folks have worked hard on the auto update feature and kept it as smooth as possible. With that in mind, should I just not bother with an SVN checkout to run my site, and just use the updater? Or is there any reason why I should keep using the SVN method?

If you’re already using the SVN method, then keep using it. Trying to auto-upgrade an SVN site will probably fail due to all the extra .svn directories and such.

Auto-upgrade doesn’t do anything special or different. It’s just replacing the WordPress files with the new ones. SVN will do the same thing.