Upgrading to Non-Current Distribution

[Colin Law]

On 1 November 2012 10:39, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:
> Kenneth Jacker wrote:
>> Thanks for your prompt reply!
>>
>>   cl> You will have to do this in two stages, to 11.10 then to 12.04.
>>   cl> Update Manager should give you the option of going to 11.10, then it
>>   cl> will give you the further option when that is complete.
>>
>> Note that I will most likely be doing all of this from the "command
>> line", not the GUI 'Update Manager'.  Guess I'll use something like
>> "apt-get upgrade".
>
> You'll use
>   sudo do-release-upgrade

Won't that try to upgrade to the latest rather than the next release
in sequence?

Colin

>
> Historically, editing your sources.list to refer to the new version
> and then running
>
>   sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
>
> was the way to do this (and it still is in Debian), but some Ubuntu
> packages rely on bits of do-release-upgrade to take care of changes
> between major versions that dist-upgrade doesn't take care of.
>
>> But won't that go directly to the latest distribution.  Here's what the
>> 'apt-get' "man page" says:
>>
>>        "'upgrade' is used to install the newest versions
>>         of all packages currently installed ..."
>>
>> Wouldn't "newest versions" be the 12.10 files/packages?
>
> No, that's perhaps ambiguous wording there. It's the latest versions
> of the packages about which apt is aware. Apt's awareness of a package
> comes from it downloading the list of available ones with an apt-get
> update.
> This downloads indexes from those repositories defined in
> /etc/apt/sources.list and your sources.list is currently configured to
> use 11.10's repositories, so your apt is only currently aware of those
> packages available for 11.10.
>
> Generally, during a release, no major version changes will happen.
> Security patches are applied, but that's it - if 11.10 shipped with
> version 2.0.1 of something, the latest possible version of that come
> the end of support for 11.10 will generally be 2.0.1. To get 2.0.2 (or
> later), you would normally need to upgrade to 12.04.
>
> --
> Avi