The key to making sense of it is:
update
updates the list of availables
either flavor of upgrade
selects and then tries to load the packages which
relate to ones you already have, that have new versions
dist-upgrade
grants APT authority to break things, in order to fix things.
Which can be creepy if interrupted badly, but for some kinds
of problems, are the only way to fix them.
That's why what I usually do (for a system that's been in real use) is
carefully and deliberately install "the libc stuff" and perl by theirselves,
and then let it dist-upgrade, now that I'm confident the core that makes
debian should be okay.
And yes, I've encountered having to do it more than once too. Someone who
kept details may want to file a bug report on the ordering mechanism applied
by dist-upgrade.
> I had to change my sources.list file to say "woody". After
> this I ran apt-get update, then apt-get dist-upgrade. All
> ran well after this.
>
> wayne
>
'Twas written:
> > Maybe I have a dumb question.
> > After you change the sources.list from 'stable' to
> > 'testing'
> > are you supposed to run apt-get upgrade first or apt-get
> > dist-upgrade?
> > I've always thought it was apt-get dist-upgrade..
> > Is that right?
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
