One of my main gripes with Drupal has always been the upgrade process. I still think there are too many manual actions involved. These have always held me back from upgrading, also because they didn't bring anything "new" to the table except for security. Everyone knows it's hard selling "security" upgrades, even when they're free. But now that Drupal 7's been out for a month it was time for me to consider upgrading again because new features _did_ get added to Drupal 7.
In order to upgrade between major versions you need to first upgrade to the latest minor version of your current Drupal release, after which you upgrade to the new major version. The first step is now done, I've uprgraded my Drupal 6.ancient (it was 6.5 actually) to 6.20. Because I'm superlazy I didn't make a backup of the database. Or is it because I trust the product, Drupal, and its community? So I copied the download link to Drupal 6.20. `ssh`ed into the server where my Drupal installation runs,`wget`ted the Drupal 6.20 link, `gunzip`ped and extracted it. Then the upgrade.
I ran the Drupal crontab from within the administration section first to see if there weren't any problems with the current setup. Then I put the site in maintenance mode in the administration section. Next, all there's to it is moving out the files/ and sites/ folders of the running Drupal installation, copy the new files and folders from Drupal 6.20 in, overwriting everything and then moving files/ and sites/ back into the new Drupal folder. Lastly the UPGRADE.txt told me to browse to http://bensch.be/update.php to run the database upgrade scripts, no errors got logged and I was good to go!
It was so easy that I even remembered to move the site back into normal mode from maintenance mode. Imagine that.
The upgrade process went so smooth that I bet none of you even noticed it!