How do you handle revision control and building from devel to production?

Hi all!

I'm just curious what your development/release processes are?

As I'm just really getting going in this web thing, I've been wanting to apply some sort of revision control system to my files and also do development on a different machine/subdomain. I am currently using RCS on the webhost and doing things manually via the commandline (I love Unix, so no big deal there).

However, once I get something tested and complete in my "devel" side (which may be either a subdomain on the webhost or a machine in my basement), I need to build the release out to the production site (ie. the one people actually look at). This is mainly what I'm wanting to gather input on.

I'm sure there are enough long-timers and experienced people around here to have some good input and good suggestions I've thought of using rsync but going from a home devel server to the production (Dreamhost) server might present problems as I don't know if they offer the remote-shell type commands (lets assume they do not at this time - I'm sure I could pipe them over ssh or something like that but I'd like to try to keep it simple).

In the past, I've done this release process via a 'make' command to another dir and then just upload the entire thing but there has to be a more elegant solution. There's probably even some pre-built open-source package out there to do exactly this. That's the kind of things I need experienced input on.

Thanks!
Mike