[NCLUG] Debian Question

[Matt Taggart]

> Contrary to what Paul does, I *ONLY* do "dist-upgrade" on my Debian
> systems.  "apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade".  I once asked taggart
> what the difference was between upgrade and dist-upgrade and he said
> something to the effect of "<shrug> I just always do dist-upgrade."

Actually I always start with upgrade, but on testing/unstable systems that 
haven't been upgraded recently I often end up letting dist-upgrade untangle 
whatever upgrade couldn't deal with.

> Though when you're comparing doing a "dist-upgrade" when the upstream
> rolls or within a few months of then, it's not a clear win over doing an
> Anaconda update in Fedora/CentOS/RHEL...

I think Debian's advantage here is having a huge pool of daily unstable 
upgrade addicts that file bugs and get things fixed quickly. This means 
that updating unstable avoids most of the pitfalls and only hits the really 
recent ones. It also means that overall the upgrade path is better tested, 
for oldstable to newstable upgrades too. This is something that RH/SuSE has 
had problems with in the past (IMO), I have heard countless times "well I 
tried upgrading, but everything broke so I just reinstalled".  But like I 
said before, it's starting to get better  now that they have their _own_ 
pools of upgrade addicts.

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org