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Debian 7.3 is out

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Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need that upgrade. The only difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade is that dist-upgrade can add and remove packages, while upgrade will decline to make any upgrades that would require this. As such, dist-upgrade is almost always the one you meant.

In my experience, there's value in doing a standard upgrade before a dist-upgrade. It seems to help to fully update the system doing "upgrade" before "doing the upgrade" (dist-upgrade) that will uninstall things... That said, it can obviously be a bit of a waste to upgrade everything like gnome just to uninstall it immediately... As such, I typically manually uninstall large tasks then upgrade then dist-upgrade and m…

Is all of this relevant to Debian based systems like Ubuntu as well?

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#52
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It truly confuses me that the upgrade instructions are so obfuscated, bordering on unfindable. Can someone point me to the chapter where an upgrade from 7.1 to this version is covered? http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/in...

As others have mentioned: $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade In this particular case, from 7.1 to 7.3, "dist-upgrade" is not needed (you aren't upgrading from one distribution to another (e.g. from 6 to 7)).

dist-upgrade does not mean distribution upgrade, it just handles additional dependencies after an upgrade and it may remove some packages if necessary.

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#53
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, there's value in doing a standard upgrade before a dist-upgrade. It seems to help to fully update the system doing "upgrade" before "doing the upgrade" (dist-upgrade) that will uninstall things... That said, it can obviously be a bit of a waste to upgrade everything like gnome just to uninstall it immediately... As such, I typically manually uninstall large tasks then upgrade then dist-upgrade and m…

Is all of this relevant to Debian based systems like Ubuntu as well?

Yes.

To clarify: dist-upgrade upgrades everything, including installing or removing new dependencies. Upgrade upgrades the installed packages, but doesn't add or remove new packages. In theory only using "upgrade" is supposed to be safer (eg more unlikely to break something) but I have not encountered any problems when using dist-upgrade (disclaimer: when you rely on the standard distro repositories; if you use unstable programs/repos or 3rd party repos/PPAs in Ubuntu, it is more likely that dist-upgrade breaks something).

But I do not agree with what ksdkkdddd said. There is not really a use to do upgrade and then dist-upgrade right after it, because upgrade doesn't magically fix something in case dist-upgrade breaks something. It works or it does not. Also if you use apt from the terminal (as you should) and not rely on graphical updaters you always get output on what may prevent upgrading and how to resolve it.

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#54
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are supposed to run those commands every day, not just with a point release. When the newbie installed debian in the first place they were (should have been) told to do that. (And yes there is a tool that will do it automatically and email you if there are updates - apticron.)

Isn't it: apt-get dist-upgrade ???

Not between point releases.

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#55
post #39

I recently gave Debian a try and one thing that surprised me, coming from Arch, is that the tool to install software, apt-get, can't list what software has already been installed. You have to use dkpg to get that information. Even funnier, I found the answer for that on the Arch Wiki page on Pacmac Rosetta: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman_Rosetta

I don't understand what is surprising or funny about that. It's pure Unix philosophy, different commands within a coherent management system. The opposite would be the surprising thing, this is not Windows. There are managers that do the whole thing in one single executable that calls others, even with GUIs etc, for dumb people.

No it's not, it's just how things turned out. The different commands have a whole bunch of separate options, and the fact that they turned out to be split upon certain lines isn't a reflection of some "philosophy". (Also, I'm glad you find it so easy to find ways to convince yourself you're not a dumb person.)

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#56
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is all of this relevant to Debian based systems like Ubuntu as well?

Yes. To clarify: dist-upgrade upgrades everything, including installing or removing new dependencies. Upgrade upgrades the installed packages, but doesn't add or remove new packages. In theory only using "upgrade" is supposed to be safer (eg more unlikely to break something) but I have not encountered any problems when using dist-upgrade (disclaimer: when you rely on the standard distro repositories; if you use unsta…

In my experience a package's ability to cope with a complex uninstall scenario generally improves with the initial upgrade - or any upgrade for that matter - (for example, sometimes dist-upgrade-specific issues are only discovered by the maintainer as part of the coordination for a release) and so (in my experience) the reliability of the "dist-upgrade" is usually increased by doing an "upgrade" first. Dist-upgrade is one of those things that "should work" of it's own accord, but there are ways of increasing the odds; I have found a pre-"dist-upgrade" upgrade is one. (Sometimes I'm impatient and only upgrade apt/aptitude before a dist-upgrade though.)

I would say it makes more of a difference on systems that are infrequently upgraded in general since a few points away from the current versions aren't going to contain many differences anyways, but I'd certainly be more hesitant to dist-upgrade from a .0 release (6.0 to 7.x, for example). I'd almost rather clean-install in that scenario since it amounts to a similarly-sized download.

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#57
post #29

Anybody knows if the kernel version was bumped?

Looks like it's still 3.2 based: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64

The kernel version isn't going to change in the 'stable' flavour. You can backport it if you need newer features, or use one of the other flavours.

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#58
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are supposed to run those commands every day, not just with a point release. When the newbie installed debian in the first place they were (should have been) told to do that. (And yes there is a tool that will do it automatically and email you if there are updates - apticron.)

Isn't it: apt-get dist-upgrade ???

The difference between 'dist-upgrade' and 'upgrade' is that 'dist-upgrade' will install new dependencies (additional methods) if necessary, while 'upgrade' holds back new versions of packages that add new dependencies.

Between point releases, there really shouldn't be new dependencies. Maybe if some library is found to be totally broken from a security point of view it is replaced by another, but that happens very rarely.

So usually, the two commands do exactly the same thing for point release upgrades.

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#59
post #44
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, performance is shite. I ended up going for a native install and you can appreciate the difference. That is, if you run Gnome 3 (which is a pile of shite as well). When on other DMs, if you can call xmonad a dm, virtual box was just awesome, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

Why would you use gnome if you've used xmonad :)I run crunchbang (debian w/ openbox) and it's awesome.

So, you're not running "awesome"? So is crunchbang now awesome? Or awesome has been renamed to crunchbang?

The naming of these is confusing :-)

Re: Debian 7.3 is out

#60
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It truly confuses me that the upgrade instructions are so obfuscated, bordering on unfindable. Can someone point me to the chapter where an upgrade from 7.1 to this version is covered? http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/in...

As others have mentioned: $ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade In this particular case, from 7.1 to 7.3, "dist-upgrade" is not needed (you aren't upgrading from one distribution to another (e.g. from 6 to 7)).

This is not Ubuntu.

Better use 'aptitude':

  sudo aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade
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