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Re: Dist-upgrade or upgrade. Which?



Patrick Bartek:
>
> I've been using Wheezy 64-bit for several months now, and as
> recommended[1] having been using "dist-upgrade" for upgrading it.  My
> sources-list[2] is set to "Wheezy" and not "testing" as per those same
> instructions.  When Wheezy is promoted to "Stable" should I switch to
> "apt-get upgrade" instead?  Or does it really matter all that much?

The main difference to keep in mind is that apt-get's upgrade operation
will never change the set of installed packages. Ever. It will only
upgrade already installed packages. No removals, no new packages.

As the stable distribution mainly receives security updates, performing
an upgrade is enough most of the time. (Point releases might be
different.)

I am running sid and habitually only run 'apt-get upgrade' because it is
a quite safe thing to do. You can find many threads on debian-user from
people who involuntarily removed half of their Gnome desktop because
they didn't look closely what their dist-upgrade was about to do. This
cannot happen when you only use the upgrade method.

To put it short: irrespective of Debian flavour, my advice is to
habitually perform upgrades and only use dist-upgrade when you see it is
actually necessary in order to upgrade certain packages.

J.
-- 
I have been manipulated and permanently distorted.
[Agree]   [Disagree]
                 <http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html>

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