[kwlug-disc] why would you do "apt-get dist-upgrade" regularly?

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Sat, 15 Aug 2009, L.D. Paniak wrote:

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> You want to run:
>
> apt-get update
> apt-get upgrade
>
> on a regular basis.  This will keep your system up to date within
> the current release.

  that part i had already figured out.  so if i have a system that was
originally installed with, say, lenny (5.0), then constant
updates/upgrades will always give me the latest lenny.  and if i look
in /etc/apt/sources.list on a lenny system sitting in front of me, i
can see the numerous explicit references to lenny, so all that's good.

  now, imagine that squeeze (6.0) comes out.  if i continue doing
updates and upgrades, i'm still going to remain at a fully-updated
lenny.  (i'm assuming that that's the equivalent of what eric referred
to as the "safe-upgrade".)

  now let's say i do a "full-upgrade".  what happens?  as i understand
it, even though my /etc/apt/sources.list explicitly refers to "lenny,"
will that take me to "squeeze?"  and if it does, will that upgrade
process update my /etc/apt/sources.list to reflect that new release?

  and while i'm here, one more question that directly affects what i'm
trying to do.  say i have my lenny system in front of me, and there is
not only a squeeze (6.0) release, but a subsequent zaphod (7.0)
release.  what would i do if i merely wanted to do a full upgrade to
*squeeze*?  AFAICT, that's a reasonable thing to do since, if i have a
really old debian system, i might want to do a full upgrade in stages,
one release at a time, fix any breakage, watch it for a while, make
sure everything still runs, then full upgrade to the next release,
etc, etc.

  how does one do that?  based on some tests i ran earlier this week,
i *thought* that, to explicitly pick the target of a full upgrade, i
needed to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all of the references
to refer to the desired target release.  now i'm not so sure.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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