Documentation → WordPress 2.7 automatic updates.
February 16th, 2009 by Jgz
To utilize the automatic update facility in WordPress 2.7 and greater, the files need to be owned by the same user as the user the web server runs as. For example, a linux installation would need to have the files owned by the apache user and group. I did this by using the following command:
chown -R apache.apache /usr/local/wordpress
From here, the update worked fine. The google analytics plugin worked fine as well.