Brian wrote: > Patrick Bartek wrote: > > FYI: Do daily updates using dist-upgrade, instead of upgrade (or the > > equivalent with aptitude, if you use that). Things change quickly and > > sometimes majorly on the path to Stable. You'll want to get ALL those > > changes -- minor and major. "Upgrade" won't do that. This is > > recommended by Debian. Once Jessie is Stable, revert to "upgrade" for > > the most part. > > I agree with everything but the final sentence. Stable is unlikely to > pull in any new packages but if it does you will likely need them. > In other words, 'dist-upgrade' should be the norm for stable. It isn't one or the other. You need both. They do different things and for different reasons. A normal daily cycle for me on any sytem is usually this sequence. Note that I am using both 'etckeeper' and have backups and thefore have no fear of purging an /etc configuration that I might want to refer to again later. Therefore I always purge instead of remove to keep the system clean. 1. apt-get update 2. apt-get upgrade 3. apt-get dist-upgrade 4. apt-get autoremove --purge 5. apt-get clean 6. reportbug --ui=text brokenpackage On a Sid Unstable system there are a lot of transitions. Running dist-upgrade only mostly works but sometimes the transitions and other noise confuse APT and it wants to take a different path than we want it to take. Such as to remove everything. Running upgrade first upgrades everything that can be upgraded without removing anything or adding anything. Then the subsequent dist-upgrade has a simpler solution to find and will usually do the right thing. Even during our current freeze in Sid there are always a lot of daily thrash of package churn. And this time is the quiet time. Immediately after release when Sid unfreezes the floodgates will be open and there will be a lot of daily breakage. In that case step 6 is reportbug. When the thrash is high is when Unstable also needs to have Testing set in the sources.list. Sometimes that is required to step across transitions. On Testing it is again the same. It isn't quite as crazy as Unstable. Thank the people running Unstable and reporting bugs preventing those bugs from flowing into Testing. Again running upgrade followed by dist-upgrade leads APT more gently through and avoids a lot of problems. On a Stable sytem 99.44% of the time only 1 and 2 are needed and I stop there and jump to clean and then stop. But every BIND9 security upgrade for example always pulls in new libraries and can't be upgraded in place. Therefore after the upgrade if there are packages still pending then I proceed through dist-upgrade and the rest. I strongly recommend using upgrade first followed by dist-upgrade. Hopefully reportbug is only rarely needed on Stable. Bob
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