Re: what's the diff between 'aptitude upgrade' and 'aptitude dist-upgrade'?
On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 21:02, Enrico Zini wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 02:22:40AM -0500, dircha wrote:
>
> > An equally adequate reference is available as:
> > /usr/share/doc/aptitude/README
>
> ...which is not too hard to paste:
>
> aptitude dist-upgrade
>
> This command will also attempt to upgrade packages, but it is more
> aggressive about solving dependency problems: it will install and
> remove packages until all dependencies are satisfied. Because of the
> nature of this command, it is possible that it will do undesirable
> things, and so you should be careful when using it.
I saw this when I first started to use debian and it scared me. It took
me quite a while to realise that when running testing or unstable, you
*normally* use dist-upgrade.
So I think this bit of info is misleading, and should be qualified in
the README to point out that this advice is excellent for production
servers and other systems that absolutely must remain functional, but
that lots of people happily use dist-upgrade regularly for their home
systems.
Option "upgrade" is for when you want to apply security patches and
minor bugfixes, without new features, right? It never installs new
packages or removes old ones, so it is limited both in the stuff it can
add and the damage it can do.
And dist-upgrade is for when you want to get all the new funky features.
Which many of us do :-). It only breaks things if the packages uploaded
by the maintainers are broken. Ok, that occasionally happens, which is
why you don't use "dist-upgrade" on your production servers except with
great care, like backups and rollback plans.
Cheers,
Simon
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