On Jo, 18 sep 14, 16:54:23, Gary Dale wrote: > > I personally prefer to always do a dist-upgrade since it is a more > complete upgrade than the normal one. If your repositories always > point to testing, this will keep you current. Other people prefer to > just do an upgrade, claiming it is safer. However you might miss > major changes, such as a switch from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice.
That's not quite accurate. The significant difference between 'upgrade'
and 'dist-upgrade' is that 'dist-upgrade' is allowed to remove packages.
This is not always necessary to keep your testing or sid system
up-to-date.
Deciding whether removing a package as part of the dist/full-upgrade is
necessary or dangerous requires some experience in running testing or,
even better, sid. If one is not comfortable making this decision (and
dealing with the consequences) there is always stable ;)
My own recommendation:
1. do an 'apt upgrade' / 'aptitude safe-upgrade' first
2. if there are held packages[1] *try* 'apt/aptitude full-upgrade'
- if it proposes to remove a package you really need you should
probably wait it out
- if it proposes to remove a package you never heard of it *might* be
safe to proceed (but if it breaks you get to keep both pieces)
[1] if there are no held packages 'full-upgrade' will not do anything,
your system is fully up-to-date.
If you used 'apt' you might want to follow-up with an
apt-get autoremove
Other than that, whenever you're not sure about how to proceed
copy-paste the *full output* of the command you're trying into a message
to -user and ask for guidance.
Kind regards,
Andrei
P.S. please note the 'apt' command is only available since apt 1.0.0
(i.e. not in wheezy)
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