upgrade vs dist-upgrade

[Matt Price]

On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 05:55:50PM +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was hoping someone could tell me more about the difference between an 
> upgrade and a dist-upgrade.
> 
> I know that upgrade is safer, I know that dist-upgrade is intended for 
> upgrading the distro (e.g. Breezy to Dapper). I know that dist-upgrade 
> does a more agressive dependency resolution and that might break things, 
> but this agressiveness is necessary when you upgrade to a new distro 
> (e.g. Dapper).
> 
> But could someone give me a concrete example (made up examples are fine) 
> of something that dist-upgrade would do but upgrade would not? I want to 
> know more about what's happening under the hood.

OK, I might not be the best person to explain this, but here's one
example.  On my Debian Sid system, I until recently had Apache 1.3
installed.  In Sid, Apache 1.3 and Apache 2 are both still maintained,
so new versions of 1.3 are always beingreleased, even though Apache2
officially "replaces" 1.3.  "apt-get upgrade" would pull in the newest
1.3 releases, along with any new releases of various libapache-mod-x
pachages.  "apt-get dist-upgrade" on the other hand, would pull in the
latest apache2 instead, and replace the libapache-x packages iwth
libapache2-x modules.  

In Ubuntu, this particular option doesn't pertain.  However I
imaginethere'ssomething kind of similar with openoffice.org, which is
called "openoffice.org2" in breezy but "openoffice.org" in dapper.
There are likely other and better examples.

matt

> 
> Thank you for the help.
> 

-------------------------------------------
Matt Price	    matt.price at utoronto.ca
History Department, University of Toronto
(416) 978-2094
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