update-manager vs apt-get

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Am Montag, den 17.07.2006, 19:03 +0200 schrieb Ante Karamatić:
> On Mon, 17 Jul 2006 11:48:41 -0400
> Lukas Sabota <punkrockguy318 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> > For breezy to dapper upgrades, update-manager was suggested over
> > apt-get dist-upgrade.  What does update-manager do that apt-get
> > doesn't?  If update-manager is required to preform a distribution
> > upgrade, perhaps a command-line version should be created, or apt
> > should be reworked to handle ubuntu upgrades properly.
> 
> update-manager doesn't do anything special. It just removes additional
> manual work (editing sources.list).
> 
> So, command line would be:
> 
> sed -i -e "s/breezy/dapper/g" /etc/apt/sources.list
> apt-get update
> apt-get dist-upgrade
> 
> So, as you can see, everything can be done from CLI.

Running "apt-get -u dist-upgrade" is the easiest part of the upgrade
process. But the dist-upgrader handles a lot of more stuff:

* checking disk space
* reinstalling ubuntu-desktop
* removing obsolete packages 
* checking that the kernel and other important packages are not removed
* restarting the dist-upgrade up two three times - it is a quite common
problem, that apt-get dist-upgrade will fail on the first run - but
dist-upgrader doesn't bother the user about this
* sanity checks for the sources.list rewrite
* disabling third party repositories (which cause a lot of trouble)

dist-upgrader was written in the sense of desktop neutrality. So you
could add a QT or ncurses interfaces in the appropriate time. 

Regards,

Sebastian