On Mar 01, 2013, at 04:52 PM, Colin Watson wrote: >On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 12:12:34PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote: >> Long gone are the days where a `apt-get upgrade` has broken my system >> (knock on wood) and while I do inspect dist-upgrades a little more >> carefully, they are usually pretty reliable too. > >FWIW, I have come to believe that nobody should use 'apt-get upgrade' as >a general rule. In particular, since it tries its best to install as >much as it can under the constraint that it never installs new packages >or removes installed ones, it will carry merrily on without installing >any new Recommends introduced by the upgrade set, and you will never >hear about them again unless some other package starts recommending the >same target packages. > >Just using 'apt-get dist-upgrade' all the time, or something with closer >semantics to that, is better.
I generally agree, but just as a point of clarification: `apt-get upgrade` will tell you when there are things its holding back, so with confirmation, it's a nice little reminder to look a little more closely before switching over to `apt-get dist-upgrade`. Usually there's no difference that I can tell, except under the circumstances you describe above, and there I like to just look a little more closely. I'm almost -- but not quite -- at the point where I *don't* care anymore since quality has been reliably so much better, but that wasn't always the case previously. In very rare cases, such as where I'm just a little suspicious about dist-upgrade's package removals[*], I'll do a test upgrade in a VM with disk snapshotting first. Cheers, -Barry [*] A recent example was the removal of libreoffice-presenter-mode (or whatever it was called). I love that package so I wanted a little more clarification about why it was being removed before I dist-upgraded. Turns out the feature was being merged into the core package, so all was well, but I'm glad I verified it first. -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
