Updating a production database schema from dev server

Hello everybody,

I am currently running two PostgreSQL servers on two different machines. One
of them I use for development and the other one as the "real" production
server for my applications.

While developing new versions of these applications, I of course have to
modify the database schema, including changing the definitions of views and
sql functions, creating new indexes and removing others, changing schemas
and data types in some tables, redistributing privileges and so on. Until
now, when I decided to update the applications on the production machine to
a newer version, I used to apply these changes manually, which is quite
error-prone and annoying.

I figure there must be a better way to do so. Is there some kind of
software, which compares two database schemas (preferably two sql dumps),
and generates a script for applying differences to one of them?

What would be the best practice for applying such updates without
endangering the data and its integrity?

Thank you very much in advance.

SR