The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

> Apt is faster and seems to be smarter about complicated updates - though one must still
watch closely when doing a dist-upgrade (often necessary with development distributions) to
ensure that apt does not stealthily remove crucial packages.

'upgrade' will never remove packages, so one can do an 'upgrade' run first, followed by a
'dist-upgrade' invocation that (if it does anything at all) can be pondered more thoroughly.

FWIW, apt will not remove essential packages (those that are needed to install other
packages), but with "crucial" you obviously meant stuff you need for your work. These
packages, once identified, can probably be protected through some apt_preferences(5) magic.

> Ubuntu, true to its Debian roots, halts the update process and asks the administrator what
to do.

dpkg's --force-conf{old,new,def} options can prevent these questions. It will work very much
like rpm then.

I wonder why none of these distributions offers a three-way merge between old-distro-version
new-distro-version and user-modified-version. By wasting a bit of diskspace it's trivial to
do.