Bob Bernstein:
>
> But the thread currently underway about dist-upgrade suggests that
> users are running it rather routinely, and not at all necessarily to
> move from one release to the next.
>
> Can someone please point out what I am missing?
What you are doing is generally the safe way. apt-get upgrade will never
change the set of installed packages. The man page says:
| under no circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or
| packages not already installed retrieved and installed.
A dist-upgrade on the other hand may install new packages or remove
existing ones in order to install available upgrades. Sometimes this
operation may remove packages you want to keep, so you should be careful
when doing that.
Personally, I don't use dist-upgrades except when I know I need to
(because apt tells me there are packages it has "kept back"). Current
example on my sid system:
| $ sudo apt-get upgrade
| Reading package lists... Done
| Building dependency tree
| Reading state information... Done
| Calculating upgrade... Done
| The following packages have been kept back:
| iceowl-extension libnss3 libnss3-1d
| 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
The nice thing about this is that I can run this without paying much
attention. I do that almost daily and don't need to think very much
about what apt is doing, even on sid. Other people pay more attention
and run dist-upgrades routinely without running into problems.
My advice is to run dist-upgrade only when necessary. That way you
automatically pay more attention, irrespective of the Debian flavour you
are using.
J.
--
When I get home from the supermarket I don't know what to do with all the
plastic.
[Agree] [Disagree]
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