How to upgrade drupal

The drupal upgrade process is similar in spirit to the upgrade process for wordpress.

Back up the database

 mysqldump --verbose -u USER -pPASSWD  masspirate_drup | gzip -9 > ~/masspirate_drup.$(date +%F).sql.gz

replacing USER and PASSWD with appropriate values.

Make sure all files are checked in

 $ git status
 # On branch master
 nothing to commit (working directory clean)

To upgrade

 drush pm-update --no-core

After upgrading, do git status and git add or git rm changed (removed) files, then

 git commit
 git push origin
 git remote update
 git merge origin/master

MF/PL's infrastructure handles updates to drupal core.

For civicrm upgrades, I've found

 $ drush help | grep civicrm-upgrade
  civicrm-upgrade       Replace CiviCRM codebase with new specified tarfile and upgrade         
  civicrm-upgrade-db    Execute the civicrm/upgrade?reset=1 process from the command line.

this seems promising, and I plan to try it the next time we need to upgrade civicrm.