upgrades

[Mario Vukelic]

On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 22:55 -0700, Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
> Are all of the methods I listed, synaptic and adept, depreciated. 

To be clear, changing sources.list and doing a dist-upgrade [1] with any
of the package managers continues to work as well as it ever did: the
user is supposed to resolve dependency issues (which usually _will_ come
up here and there) and to implement any changes that cannot be expressed
in the form of package dependencies (e.g., stuff like group
memberships).
Ubuntu does not test these upgrade paths and AFAIK Canonical does not
support them.

The update-manager is fitted with special logic to resolve any issues
for specific upgrades (e.g., 6.06 -> 8.04). These are downloaded before
doing the upgrade, and aim to relieve the user from the tasks I
mentioned above. This upgrade path is also tested. IMHO it should,
therefore, be the method of choice to recommend to anyone who needs to
ask.

The methods are detailed at http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading
To upgrade to an alpha or beta release, special switches need to be used
for update-manager: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/intrepid/alpha6


[1] dist-upgrade itself is deprecated, at least in aptitude. It is now
called full-upgrade.