what do you want to see in future apt versions ?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 5 Jun 2020 08:35:39 -0400, Little Girl wrote:
>to fend off fears of unintentionally upgrading to a new operating
>system release as long as "upgrade" remains in the command.

It's good, if people fear to do something unintentionally, if
they aren't willing to read the fine manual. While unintentionally
upgrading to the next release by apt or apt-get is completely
impossible, apt and apt-get are very powerful and complex commands, so
using them without learning is very risky, since other things could
happen unintentionally, when using those commands without even basic
skills.

Btw. if somebody knows what she is doing, the "-y, --yes, --assume-yes"
switch could be used, e.g. by a script that first checks, that it's
safe to assume yes. When just running the apt command, assuming yes is
grossly negligent. First read, then interactively decide how to
continue.

The averaged unskilled computer user from next door, should trust the
user-friendly GUIs provided by Ubuntu, doing all the updates
automagically. Assuming only safe and maintained repositories are
used, nobody needs to care about the command line tools and could trust
the GUIs.

Those who wish to customize their Ubuntu installs want a clear, stable,
steady command. Without doubts "dist-upgrade" could be misunderstood,
but it's the only option and since we anyway need to learn how to use
apt-get or apt, it's not hard to learn what it does. The reason that
"dist-upgrade" does what it does, is not that easy to understand, since
the whole infrastructure of any operating system isn't easy to
understand. At admin level you always need to gain skills.