Ubuntu server holding back on me

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Sep 22, 2017 at 07:32:28AM -0400, Peter Silva wrote:
> I think an additional source of confusion is that upgrading debian, a
> normal way to upgrade to a later 'stable' (equiv. to LTS) is to change
> repos in /etc/apt, and do 'apt-get dist-upgrade'... while this
> operation was always fairly functional and reliable to upgrade Debian
> servers, I had little, if any success using it in Ubuntu
> (do_release_upgrade works bettter.) It is unexpected and confusing
> that Debian and Ubuntu are different in that way, since they are so
> close otherwise.

I've been using dist-upgrade routinely in Ubuntu for 13 years both on my
own development systems and on the "normal" user systems I manage at
home, and it does in general work even if it requires slightly more
steps and occasionally a bit of cleanup.  No doubt it depends somewhat
on the state of the system going in, and I'm generally pretty careful to
keep the systems I manage clean in the sort of way that causes minimal
trouble for upgrades.

(That said, do-release-upgrade indeed has some more tweaks and is the
officially recommended tool; I have no issues with it being presented to
users as the preferred inter-series upgrade frontend.)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]