On Fri 23 Jun 2023 at 15:51:31 (-0700), Steve Sobol wrote: > On 2023-06-23 15:26, Emanuel Berg wrote: > > Steve Sobol wrote: > > > > > > In general people don't want to dist-upgrade automatically. > > > > > > Seconded. > > > > I'm not following, when these functions are invoked, be it > > scheduled by some other software or by the user from the shell, > > they are intended to do their work automatically > > (non-interactively) if that is what you mean? > > Dist-upgrade makes major changes to your system, updating dozens of > packages, and pointing the OS at different APT repos.
Yes, but only if you've changed the codename in your sources.list (or after a new release if you use the suite names). > Automating such changes would be a very bad idea. Agreed, though I use dist-upgrade routinely in combination with -d in my cron job: 0 */3 * * * apt-get -qq -o Acquire::http::Proxy="http://192.168.1.14:3142/"; update && apt-get -qq -d -o Acquire::http::Proxy="http://192.168.1.14:3142/"; dist-upgrade && find /var/cache/apt/archives/ -name '*deb' As well as acting as a notification, this saves waiting while the packages are downloaded when actually doing the upgrade. > Personally, I avoid doing in-place upgrades from one Debian/Ubuntu > release to another. Given the low cost and quick turnaround time > involved in spinning up a new VPS, I will almost always spin up a new > VM instead, and move services and data from the old one to the new > one. But if I have to do an in-place upgrade, I'm going to sit and > watch it happen... just in case something goes wrong. Because I run several old machines (and nothing you could call new), I use a similar scheme, but machine by machine rather than VMs. It does rely somewhat on a careful record of configuration changes made on each system for speed and consistency. Each system has two consecutive releases installed on its drive at any time. Cheers, David.
