SVN checkout or export for production environment?

Question

In a project I am working on, we have an ongoing discussion amongst the dev team - should the production environment be deployed as a checkout from the SVN repository or as

Answer 1

The Subversion FAQ seems to advocate deployment as a checkout, autoupdated with post-commit hook scripts. They prevent Apache from exporting .svn folders (probably a good idea) by adding the following in httpd.conf:

# Disallow browsing of Subversion working copy administrative dirs.

    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all

I'm extremely new to svn myself, but maybe you could trigger a hook script when you create a new tag. That way, when you're ready to update the live site, you just commit your last changes to the trunk, create the new tag, and the script updates your live site with svn update.