Upgrade to final or not?

[volvoguy]

I'm going to butt in with a (hopefully) somewhat related question that
may be obvious to more technical Debian/Ubuntu users, but I haven't
seen covered anywhere yet.

Synaptic gives two different upgrade options - default and smart. My
understanding is that default means "upgrade" and smart means
"dist-upgrade". The way the popup in Synaptic describes it, the
default upgrade won't upgrade anything that has unmet dependencies,
but the smart upgrade will try to fulfill dependencies. Before I
learned anything about apt-get, the smart option sounded like a better
idea to me, so that's what I've been doing on a semi-regular basis.

Could someone with a little more knowledge than me (it doesn't take
much!) explain why you would or would not want to use either of these
two options?

Thanks!

Aaron

PS. It's probably just me, but I thought it pretty funny that the
spellcheck in GMail gave me the suggestion of "poop" for the word
"popup". I think most internet users would concur. :-)