On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 04:57:36 -0500 Richard Owlett <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Can someone point me to a discussion of why one would chose a > particular option? > The important difference is that 'upgrade' (aptitude safe-upgrade) will not remove a package without replacing it with a more up-to-date version of the same package. 'Dist-upgrade' (aptitude full-upgrade) may remove packages permanently where they have been superseded by different packages, or a combination thereof, or where they have been withdrawn from the distribution and were not manually installed. There should be no significant difference with the stable distribution, which should never alter its architecture, but that's something that happens frequently with unstable and testing. Using dist-upgrade without due care and attention in those distributions is risky. Having said that, the default method of Synaptic is dist-upgrade, and failing to use dist-upgrade at least some of the time will leave unstable or testing out of date, only partially upgraded. -- Joe
