With this upgrade being so painless why not upgrade now? There aren't going to be many changes anyway. Gnome3 & LO were the major changes from this release& those most likely won't change for a long while.

Wheezy has been in freeze for a long time, I don't even remember the exact date, but 8 or 9 months. An awful lot of packages are piled up for Jessie. That needs cleared up so that work can continue.

As an example the original intention was to go to Xfce 4.10. It actually made it to Sid at one time about a year ago. There was a problem with the panel and it was decided to stick with 4.8. Those packages are probably stable by now but they are still stuck in the experimental repo.

Upstream does not stop for Debian. The Squeeze to Wheezy upgrade was right around 1200 packages for my install which I admit was somewhat bloated. There was very little change that you would notice at all. There was a kernel upgrade that may have been seen but most things looked pretty much the same. Obviously a lot of version numbers changed but most people don't notice that much.

The main changes are actually the kernel in any version upgrade. Everything else runs on it. All the thousands of packages in the repo need to work with the kernel in the release. This takes time and careful management going one step at a time. Kernel version change is one time you can count on some packages on some hardware to break.

There has been quite a change in the Xorg stuff and will be again before Jessie is released. This has to be dealt with very carefully. Will probably be 2 major Xorg upgrades and possibly as many as 5 before Jessie is released. This always brings on some breakage. My system broke only once in this last cycle and that was with an Xorg version change (was also avoidable if I had been thinking instead of just hitting OK like some MS user).

These are the things that make everything work, they are put out by different groups, at different times. To develop the new release all this has to be balanced with little things like the OOo to LO change.

Then there is a need to build a new installer that works with all this basic change. That has to go on in the background trying to keep pace with the changes in the OS.

They will be dumping all the backlog of packages on use eventually. A 2 year target date is not a long time. They need to clear up the left overs from Wheezy before they can get serious about Jessie.

With decades of experience and a history of successful, stable releases I am pretty sure they will not be long in doing so.

Then we can have fun running less stable things like Jessie because we are goofy enough to prefer it to the real thing. But we get to watch it being built which is about the most interesting thing in the world to me.

My original install had about 1200 packages so I would expect that all of those packages would all be upgraded,which were. My upgrade from squeeze to wheezy was about that. But the upgrade from wheezy to testing was quite a bit less only about 212 packages.
No a 2 yr target isn't long, but wheezy has been more stable than any of the debian os'es that I've had & I started this adventure with Lenny. TBH I never got Lenny running.

Interesting.

I started with Lenny, was my secondary OS while running Ubuntu 8.04. Took me a while to get it set up but it ran well OTB. I may not have much use for Canonical and their attitude but they have sped up the move toward easier configuration (even if they seem to believe you shouldn't be able to do it any more).

Squeeze was a big change from Lenny.

We obviously have not seen the real upgrade from Wheezy to Jessie or the version would have changed in the files. I want it bad. Jonesing for it.

Been seriously working on learning to use Gimp in image editing (photos). Have a lot of rather strange but, if I say so myself, pretty good looking images for backgrounds and screen saver image files. Some custom icons. All to be used in Jessie.

Well, less is broken by man-db, as such if I hit the magic Y key, apt says will remove a lot of packages, so I think I'll keep as is for now.

did it. less or no less (no less). haven't checked my webcam yet.

Remove or upgrade there is a difference, if it is only removing packages then you have to change your packages in aptitude to manually installed.
I had 1 installation where it uninstalled my whole DE, which is easily corrected by using "tasksel" as root & reselecting DE.

Yes, I know the difference between remove and upgrade. If I had typed 'Y', it would have removed a lot of packages, some which I see no obvious connection to less, but hey, that's what the 'N' key is for. Interestingly enough less is still broken, but I no longer get the long list, so perhaps it was a momentary dependency glitch.

Same here.
I was at least hoping for some complicated issues with all the "experimental" packages I was running (mostly systemd and X stuff).

Those DD's are are taking all the fun away.
It all just worked

Like I said you can use aptitude to mark packages as "Manually Installed", then it won't remove packages unless they are upgraded or no longer necessary. If you type aptitude in terminal aptitude gui will open if you go to installed programs it will show a list of packages that are auto-installed and manually installed, there you can change from auto to manual.

Debian is like that nowadays.

I haven't had much to do with Jessie yet, my aunt's name was Jessie so there is an aversion to it already lol , I'm going to thoroughly clean up my main laptop and do fresh reinstalls of everything when university is finished for this trimester.

The more stable releases may be different but in my experience a dist-upgrade will remove even explicitly installed packages. I have manually installed mplayer many times, for example, but it is was removed in a recent dist-upgrade. Manually marking stops packages you're using being automatically removed when something depending on them is removed not the other way around.

Since you made this statement I think that you should install in VB & then try the upgrade, for some reason on certain installations I've run into this problem, but not all.
When the situation arises there is a solution which I've already provided on this thread.

Now we may start to get somewhere.
For any one interested in this command for your install this is normally run as user. This was run as root as I am running from Wheezy in a chroot.

All you need is the user prompt ($) of the "normal" terminal.

This last little update/upgrade started with the base-files package. I think building has commenced.

Sid had a pretty good bunch of packages (116 total have only run the "upgrade" part (94).

I'm willing to believe that if you use aptitude and perform the commands that you state it may prevent auto-removal. Using apt-get, however, installing packages manually has no effect on their removal, or not, by dist-upgrading.