apt-get upgrade or dist-upgrade?

[gwpritch]

I've read the man page but I can't get my head around the difference between dist-upgrade and upgrade with apt-get. Could someone please illuminate me. Are they both safe to use with impunity?

[sans-hubris]

I'm not totally sure about the diffs between the two either, but I've noticed that apt-get upgrade doesn't alway upgrade everything that needs to be upgraded. If you want to get everything upgraded, then do apt-get dist-upgrade.

[sans-hubris]

I'm not completely sure about this, but I've noticed that apt-get upgrade usually upgrades small packages that don't take long to download, while apt-get dist-upgrade seems to upgrade not just the small packages, but also very large ones as well. I don't know what apt-get determines as big or small.

[sincka]

To tell you the truth, I sort of know what the difference is but I am not sure enough to tell you anything. All I can say is that if you are running unstable/testing you probably shouldn't do apt-get dist-upgrade since it made me reinstall debian about 20 times or so. Just do apt-get upgrade... should be good enough :) But if you're not scared of reinstalling try apt-get dist-upgrade and see what happens.

[gwpritch]

Chucking abandon to the wind I tried a dist-upgrade. Seems to have gone alright...no smoke...yet. Missed a couple of packages but I probably should have done an update immediately beforehand. Thanks for the replies.