Ok, given that admin role, or a patch to adminrole to allow sudo seems like a great Idea. I'll move this to the issue queue for that project.

On May 12, 2009, at 2:03 AM, Nathaniel Catchpole wrote:

FWIW, I would support a core patch that adds a permission to "Run updates".

And here it is: http://drupal.org/node/67234

Nat