Let's Discuss Interim Releases (and a Rolling Release)

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 01, 2013, at 04:52 PM, Colin Watson wrote:

>On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 12:12:34PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> Long gone are the days where a `apt-get upgrade` has broken my system
>> (knock on wood) and while I do inspect dist-upgrades a little more
>> carefully, they are usually pretty reliable too.
>
>FWIW, I have come to believe that nobody should use 'apt-get upgrade' as
>a general rule.  In particular, since it tries its best to install as
>much as it can under the constraint that it never installs new packages
>or removes installed ones, it will carry merrily on without installing
>any new Recommends introduced by the upgrade set, and you will never
>hear about them again unless some other package starts recommending the
>same target packages.
>
>Just using 'apt-get dist-upgrade' all the time, or something with closer
>semantics to that, is better.

I generally agree, but just as a point of clarification: `apt-get upgrade`
will tell you when there are things its holding back, so with confirmation,
it's a nice little reminder to look a little more closely before switching
over to `apt-get dist-upgrade`.  Usually there's no difference that I can
tell, except under the circumstances you describe above, and there I like to
just look a little more closely.  I'm almost -- but not quite -- at the point
where I *don't* care anymore since quality has been reliably so much better,
but that wasn't always the case previously.  In very rare cases, such as where
I'm just a little suspicious about dist-upgrade's package removals[*], I'll do
a test upgrade in a VM with disk snapshotting first.

Cheers,
-Barry

[*] A recent example was the removal of libreoffice-presenter-mode (or
whatever it was called).  I love that package so I wanted a little more
clarification about why it was being removed before I dist-upgraded.  Turns
out the feature was being merged into the core package, so all was well, but
I'm glad I verified it first.