Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
or on ubuntu, there's a wrapper script called 'do-release-upgrade'. not really sure what, if any, benefit it has over 'apt-get dist-upgrade' but it's there all the same. automatically updates the sources.list to the latest alliterated animal at least, and probably other stuff.
Debian has release notes. For example, anyone doing a simple "dist-upgrade" from Squeeze to Wheezy is likely to completely bugger their system due to apt blowing its heap trying to find an ordering ("could not perform immediate configuration"). Anyone that follows the release notes FIRST can allegedly avoid this, but once it's happened repairing it is allegedly hard. Ubuntu knows their users can't read, so instead they use d-r-u, which basically downlaods a tarball of filthy little kludges to workaround upgrade issues. I'm extremely unenthusiastic about the latter approach because I believe it ends up being used to try to auto-detect things that it can't get 100% right, so unusual systems explode on upgrade. I also believe this negatively impacts the quantity and quality of upgrade notes. OTOH, it has been pointed out that d-r-u's approach would have allowed the DDs to avoid the immediate-configuration issue entirely, because d-r-u's tarball exists outside the repo, so what it downloads is the current version, rather than what existed as at squeeze. Overall, I think it's reasonable to use a d-r-u approach in moderation, for things that you can reliably detect and fix, AND can't be fixed fix in-band with NMUs. Things that might require human judgement in edge cases should continue to be documented in the release notes.