There seems to be a common misconception about Debian’s package manager “apt”, that the command “dist-upgrade” is used to upgrade to a new release. It is, but it isn’t. I wanted to clarify that here.

Basically, there are 4 things that you might want to do as part of upgrading a system.

  • apt-get update – updates the list of available packages and versions
  • apt-get upgrade – upgrade packages that you already have
  • apt-get dist-upgrade – upgrade packages that you already have, PLUS install any new dependencies that have come up
  • edit the sources files – change the release that you are tracking

That means that to freshen up your packages to the latest versions on your current release, you should do “apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade“. On some systems that track “testing”, which changes often, I do this almost daily.

When you’re ready to “really upgrade” to a new release, you edit your sources files in /etc/apt/sources and change the release names. If the source lists contain proper release names, like “etch”, “lenny”, “squeeze” or “wheezy”; then you change these names to the new release that you want (see http://www.debian.org/releases/). If the source lists contain symbolic names like “stable”, “testing” and “unstable”, you do not need to change anything. When a new release is ready, the Debian people will change the symbols to point to the new release names. For example, right now, stable=squeeze and testing=wheezy.

Note 1 – “unstable” never points to a named release… it’s the pre-release proving ground for packages, used before are ready for inclusion in the testing release.

Note 2 – Don’t let these symbolic names fool you:

  • “Stable” means “old, tried, tested, and rock solid”.  It’s a very conservative choice.
  • “Testing” does not mean “chaotic”. It is roughly the equivalent of Red Hat’s Fedora. It’s new stuff, and each package changes on its own schedule, but they usually play well together.
  • “Unstable” is not nearly as unstable as the name implies. It’s like a beta release that may be updated daily.

After your source lists look OK, you do the same thing you’ve always done: “apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade“”apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade“.

If you’re running Ubuntu, the release names are at http://releases.ubuntu.com/. And they’ve made a nice wrapper script called “do-release-upgrade” that basically edits your source lists and does the dist-upgrade for you (it also does some other nice steps, like letting you review the changes).

So there it is… fear not the “dist-upgrade”. In fact, most of the time, it is what you’ll want to run. It will make sure that you have all of the dependencies that you need.