Re: [sheflug] Ubuntu/Debian (was Re: Apache,shtml and php config. problem)

[Adam Funk <a.funk [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As I understand it, the main difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade
is that upgrade will not add or remove any other packages in order to
upgrade a currently installed package.  For example, if you have foo-1.3
which depends on libfoo, upgrade won't install foo-1.4 if it depends on
libfoo and libbar.

On the other hand, dist-upgrade will install libbar and upgrade foo to
1.4, but it will also want to remove anything that conflicts.

In my experience, the dependencies in testing/unstable change often
enough that upgrade doesn't really upgrade many packages, but
dist-upgrade always wants to remove things I'm using.  The only way I
could try to keep my system up to date involved randomly picking
packages it wanted to upgrade and running `aptitude install whatever` to
find out whether it could be done without removing anything --- repeatedly.

The situation was probably complicated because (although I almost never
manually pinned packages) I had a lot of packages pinned by
apt-listbugs, which I used because I'd had applications suddenly stop
working after upgrades because of reported bugs.

Of course I may not have been using Debian's packaging tools in the best
possible way?!

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