Upgrading through apt source

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Thu, March 17, 2011 19:07, David Curtis wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Koh Choon Lin
> <durians009 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi all
>>
>> Can anyone tell me what are the consequences for a box on 10.04, I
>> change all the repositories to 10.10 and upgrade all the software? I
>> realized it could be done and its still working fine after weeks now.
>> Now, I am thinking of changing it to 11.04.
>>
>> Is there a list of tasks not done this way instead of upgrading the
>> proper way, ie. "update-manager -d"?
>>
>>From 'man update-manager',
>
> * eventually reinstall the package ubuntu-desktop
> * switch to an updated sources.list entries
> * adds the default user to new groups if needed
>
> The top one is what usually gets people, if you've uninstalled
> ubuntu-desktop, which is a very common occurence, you won't get the full
> deps for that meta-package and won't get the new sofware sets that are
> 11.04.
>
> I would guess that using update-manager now would probably not do anything
> that bad and the logs would answer your question fully, but I've never
> done it, YMMV.

There was a thread about this a couple of months ago. To summarize, if you
want to know every little detail that 'sudo update-manager -d' does, take
a look at it's source code. It's just a collection of well commented
Python scripts so it's more or less hunam readable.

I'll save you some trouble and give you the direct link to the source code
on Launchpad of one of the most interesting files:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/maverick/update-manager/maverick/view/head:/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeQuirks.py

-- 
Amedee