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The guys at Chapter Three recently detailed how they do Drupal core upgrades with a shell script and the find command. This has a couple of drawbacks.

First, the result is not necessarily an accurate representation of the new Drupal core, because it doesn't address moved or deleted files, only added and changed ones. Second, it will overwrite any changes you've made to core. Yes, I know this should never ever happen because you should never ever hack core. Still, it overwrites without asking, when a manual merge is what's really called for.

Has anyone else solved this differently? I have a method that has worked almost perfectly that I'll write more about next week.

Update I

For an example of moved/deleted files in Drupal core, and the problems they might cause, please direct your attention to the release announcement for Drupal 5:

"Because the directory structure in Drupal changed, it is recommended not to extract Drupal 5.0 on top of your existing installation. Start with a fresh copy instead, and copy over your custom modules, themes and configuration file."

With version 5 of core, .module files were moved into their own respective folders with .info files. But upgrading from 4.7 to 5 this way would leave old versions of all the core modules sitting in the modules/ directory.

Update II

A follow-up post on vendor branches and svn_load_dirs is now available.