L.V.Gandhi wrote:
On 4/13/06, S. M. Ibrahim <smibrahim@gmail.com> wrote:Sorry for this post. I tell him (L.V.Gandhi) to make dist-upgrade now, as i found that, at the first upgrade you may not get xserver-xorg 7.1 . I tested this on one of my pc. After that, when i make apt-get update and check the cache policy of xserver-xorg , i found 7.1 version is waiting for upgrade.May be a foolish question? Is it sufficient to run upgrade in an already running sid? Or dist-upgrade should be done? What is the benefit of latter one?
man apt-get. upgradeupgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages currently installed on the system from the sources enumerated in apt/sources.list. Packages currently installed with new versions available are retrieved and upgraded; **under no circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or packages not already installed retrieved and installed**. New versions of currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded without changing the install status of another package will be left at their current version. An update must be performed first so that apt-get knows that new versions of packages are available.
dist-upgradedist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages; apt-get has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones if necessary. The /etc/apt/sources.list file contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package files. See also apt_preferences(5) for a mechanism for overriding the general settings for individual packages.
Therefore it may be necessary to do a dist-upgrade if an upgraded package requires an additional new package to be installed, or old obsolete packages will be removed. Use with caution as sometimes sid is broken and will remove half of e.g. gnome/kde due to new versions of packages not yet being available.
HTH Wackojacko