Sharepoint upgrade/migrate lists in production environment

Assume you deploy a Sharepoint solution, which consists of multiple WebParts and multiple Lists. Now in a later version of this solution, you want to extend/modify these lists, like add or remove columns.

How do you deploy such changes to a production environment? Meaning, how do you apply these changes to a pr开发者_运维知识库oduction environment where these lists contain production data?

Update This also includes changes to the Views of the lists.

In my deployment we have a "SolutionName_UpdateFields" feature. We implement adding/deleting fields etc jobs in the FeatureActivated event receiver of this feature. The code in this class is written so that it can be called many times, but it will attempt to perform the changes only once (if we're adding a field, first check if the field is not already there etc).

Then we ask the admins to stsadm -o deactivatefeature and then stsadm -o activatefeature again, hence forcing the code to be executed.