hamm to slink with upgrade

[<mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu>]

There have been several posts on debian-user asking how to use apt-get
to upgrade from hamm to slink, now that the binaries no longer fit on
a single CD.

I've seen two answers so far on the list---both of them containing
very helpful suggestions, but very different from one another, and
both sort of telegraphic.

There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of people out there now who
have just received the CD pack from Cheapbytes or Linux Central or
wherever and who, like me, have no idea at all how to do the upgrade
using apt-get. I've looked pretty diligently in the places I know
about, but I haven't managed to find any advice on this.  The upgrade
advice contained in the Release Notes for 2.1 suggests the use of
apt-get for the upgrade, but there's no mention there of the
multiple-cd problem. Nor does it discuss the issue for dselect.  There
is some very brief advice in the multiCD.README file on the CD itself,
but this talks only about installation, not about an upgrade, and it
refers only to dselect.  The man page for apt-get tells you how to use
a mounted CD as the archive, but you can't guess from it how to use
apt-get when the packages are spread across two CDs and you can only
mount one at a time.

The smoothness of the upgrade from bo to hamm using apt-get was one of
the things that really convinced me that debian was the best linux
distribution for people like me (a reasonably knowledgeable user, but
*not* a programmer). The lack of advice, official or unofficial, about
this very basic problem for users strikes me as weird and untypical.

Is there anywhere where somebody like me can go and read a reasonably
clear account of how to use apt-get to do the upgrade with the two
CD's?  Is there an official `debian position' on how to do it?

Jim