Re: Confused about dist-upgrade

[Osamu Aoki <osamu_aoki_home@nifty.com>]

Hi,

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:25:01AM +0000, Brian wrote:
> On Fri 24 Jan 2014 at 11:54:12 +0200, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> 
> > The recommended way is specific to each release and thoroughly 
> > documented in the Release Notes.
> 
> Which is where I got what I wrote from:

I bet it was only for the recent ones.
 
>   If the system being upgraded provides critical services for your
>   users or the network[2], you can reduce the downtime if you do a
>   minimal system upgrade, as described in Section 4.4.5, “Minimal
>   system upgrade”, followed by a kernel upgrade and reboot, and then
>   upgrade the packages associated with your critical services.
>   Upgrade these packages prior to doing the full upgrade described
>   in Section 4.4.6, “Upgrading the system”. This way you can ensure
>   that these critical services are running and available through the
>   full upgrade process, and their downtime is reduced.
> 
> Alternatively:
> 
>   In some cases, doing the full upgrade (as described below)
>   directly might remove large numbers of packages that you will want
>   to keep. We therefore recommend a two-part upgrade process: first
>   a minimal upgrade to overcome these conflicts, then a full upgrade
>   as described in Section 4.4.6, “Upgrading the system”
> 
> Sections 4.1.3. and 4.4.5. of
> 
>   http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html

Have you heard glibc or perl transitions.  Those complication may happen again. 
Also there are more in the Release Notes.  namely,

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html

I think we are doing our best avoid complications but the canonical
place for the recommended way is the Release Notes.  Nothing else.

So as a baseline, process you described is fine.  But Andrei's point is
very important.

Osamu