upgrade vs dist-upgrade

John Vivirito gnomefreak at gmail.com
Mon Apr 10 20:27:37 UTC 2006


>
> 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.
> >
> > Thank you for the help.
> >
> > Cheers, Daniel.
>
> from `man apt-get':
>
> "dist-upgrade  in addition to performing the function of upgrade,
> also intelligently handles changing dependencies with  new  ver‐
> sions  of  packages;  apt-get  has a "smart" conflict resolution
> system, and it will attempt to upgrade the most important  pack‐
> ages  at  the  expense  of less important ones if necessary. The
> /etc/apt/sources.list file contains a  list  of  locations  from
> which  to  retrieve  desired package files. See also apt_prefer‐
> ences(5) for a mechanism for overriding the general settings for
> individual packages."
>
> To satisfy dependencies dist-upgrade can remove packages. That's the
> reason it can break stuff.




i use dist-upgrade always because it grabs kernel updates and some others
that upgrade wont grab. the only thing ive seen that would be taken away due
to depends is the ubuntu-desktop or whatever other desktop is being used and
its ok to get rid of that. i have not ran into any issues n 2 years using
dist-upgrade (except on devel versions of ubuntu)
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