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 an export?

The development environment is obviously a checkout, since it is constantly updated. For the production, I'm personally for checking out the main trunk, since it makes future updates easier (just run svn update). However some of the devs are against it, as svn creates files with the group/owner and permissions of the svn process (this is on a linux OS, so those things matter), and also having the .svn directories on the production seem to them to be somewhat dirty.

Also, if it is a checkout - how do you push individual features to the production without including in-development code? do you use tags or branch out for each feature? any alternatives?

EDIT: I might not have been clear - one of the requirement is to be able to constantly be able to push fixes to the production environment. We want to avoid a complete build (which takes much longer than a simple update) just for pushing critical fixes.