right or wrong [LWN.net]

right or wrong

Posted Mar 11, 2004 23:17 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: A grumpy editor's calendar search by coriordan
Parent article: A grumpy editor's calendar search

>> the parent post is simply wrong
>Nope.
>I commented that he should have been using 'upgrade'. I'm right.

But that was a minor part of the subject post. The thrust of it was,

>'dist-upgrade' shouldn't be used by people running Debian
>unstable... 'dist-upgrade' is for upgrading between versions of debian
>(2.2 -> 3.0), but unstable doesn't have versions.

Do you stand by that? As a general rule, and not limited to our editor's recent sorrow, should dist-upgrade not be used by people running Debian unstable? Is it for upgrading between versions?

I'm not attacking; I really want to know.

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right or wrong

Posted Mar 12, 2004 0:06 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

dist-upgrade will do you no harm (AFAIK) *if* you monitor it each time you use it. If you don't monitor it, you may end up having to write an insightful article about alternative software packages.

If you use 'upgrade', you won't have to write the article. If 'upgrade' is not going to upgrade a certain pacakge, it will tell you. You can then 'apt-get install' that package if you want to, and you'll be told that to install package "x", package "y" has to be removed - or whatever the problem is.

Back in my day (all of 3 years ago), when upgrading from a stable version to another stable version, or for upgrading from stable -> testing, it was recommended that you use 'dist-upgrade'. robster above says that 'dist-upgrade' is not even recommended for this anymore. (the release notes for Woody-3.0 still recommend 'dist-upgrade' for version upgrades. Maybe robster is talking about the release notes for the upcoming 3.1?)

The main thrust of my post was meant to be my advice to Our Editor. I'm glad no one disputed that he should be using Emacs - that is a little harder to prove ;-)