Can't do an update with sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get upgrade, pasting output in this message

[Colin Law]

On 14 December 2012 21:37, William Scott Lockwood III
<vladinator at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 13 December 2012 23:11, James R McKenzie <jimmckenzie at earthlink.net>
>> wrote:
>> > For the record, no other update process was running.
>> > Jims64BitLinuxMint13LapTop ~ # sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get
>> > upgrade
>>
>> Just for the record, for keeping everything up to date you should use
>> sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
>>
>> Colin
>
>
> While generally I agree with this advice, I wouldn't necessarily do that
> with servers. Some things that are held back (like new kernels) are held
> back for very good reasons. You should only use dist-upgrade if you're on a
> workstation that you don't care about potentially blowing up, or on machines
> you're testing/qa'ing on for eventual release to production.

I don't understand what you mean.  From man apt-get:
upgrade
  upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages
currently installed on the system ...

dist-upgrade
  dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also
intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of
packages ...

I don't quite see how that relates to your comments.  Can you clarify?

Colin