From http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap...pt-get.en.html

3.4 Upgrading packages
Package upgrades are a great success of the APT system. They can be achieved with a single command: apt-get upgrade. You can use this command to upgrade packages within the same distribution, as well as to upgrade to a new distribution, although for the latter the command apt-get dist-upgrade is preferred

What's the difference between "apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get dist-upgrade"?

Also, what is the difference between "upgrade packages within the same distribution" and "upgrade to a new distribution"? What is meant by same distribution and new distribution?

Thanks !

Distributions are the "version" of your Linux OS - eg RH9, Debian 3.0

An upgrade within the same distribution means to install up to date packages for the distribution, Distribution Upgrades upgrade your present distribution to whatever the current one is.

Would it be correct to say that it is redundent to use the "apt-get dist-upgrade" command if I've install Debian 3.0, since 3.0 is already the current version and there isn't any 3.1 or later version available?

Thanks !

No, it wouldn't. Debian 3.0 is old, although the current release. The way Debian works is to have a release version, then testing and unstable versions. A dist-upgrade would bump you up to one of those.

Go to the Debian homepage and look up what you need to do to upgrade. BTW, despite the names, from what I've heard testing and unstable are both very stable.

The way that packages leave incoming ---> experimental ---> unstable ---> testing is layed out on the Debian home site. Stable is the distribution when all the packages in testing are 'frozen' and no new ones are allowed to come into it. The release is made. If its stable its STABLE. You won't find a more stable GNU/Linux platform than Debian stable (you'd have to compare it with a FreeBSD release.

apt-get upgrade upgrades what you have on the system already but doesn't introduce new packages unless absolutely necessary.

apt-get dist-upgrade upgrades everything on your system and resolves any new dependancies as well, thus introducing more new stuff tou your system.

To get from stable to testing or unstable, you have to point your /etc/apt/sources.list to testing or unstable folders on your update mirrors instead of stable.

Hope this helped a bit. BTW, if you have a bit of time and you loke OS stuff, you might want to scour the Debian site. There's a lot of really neat stuff that's going on. Debian Hurd, Debian/NetBSD, etc. Cool.