Noobie question concerning upgrading, was Re: Daper -> Fiesty

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 20:11 -0600, debian wrote:
> im wondering why cant you just upgrade straight from say Dapper to 
> Fiesty and skip edgy? would that cause software conflicts?

Well, you _can do it, but it is unsupported. I'm sure somebody who knows
what he/she is doing, and knows about the intricacies of dependencies,
"apt-get -f", "dpkg --force-things", and who is not lost if X dies or
booting fails can manage.

However, to prevent mess-ups during the upgrade, and the need to
manually fix things (i.e., to progress beyond how dist-upgrades worked
in Debian), Ubuntu invented the update-manager.
When the time for dist-upgrade comes, the update-manager is updated
(through the ubuntu-updates repository) with a version that contains
handcrafted logic particularly for this upgrade. It's just that the
Ubuntu guys create and test this logic only for the officially
sanctioned upgrade paths, from LTS to LTS, or from intermediate release
to intermediate release without skipping.