All you need is Capistrano and an account on the deploy machine. This can be used and extended to deploy to several servers (also at once), move databases around, etc. The gain is that you don't need to login to the server. We can talk about that interesting technique tomorrow.
spent some time today trying to figure out how to create a CCK field as part of an hook_update_N function. Unlike previous versions of CCK, in 6 it's very easy to manipulate the fields from code.
Using CVS to maintain a Drupal website
Normally drupal.org inserts version information when a project is packaged. Git repositories do not contain this information. Git Deploy hooks into the Drupal update system and attempts to provide the version of modules and themes checked out of git.
Automatically download and update your translations fetching them from localize.drupal.org or any other Localization server.
Unfortunately, while Capistrano is all easy to use with Rails, I had to write a custom Drupal-tailored Capfile.
A lot of this hassle can be reduced by installing drupal from cvs rather than installing one of the releases, and by keeping your installation under version control