It truly confuses me that the upgrade instructions are so obfuscated, bordering on unfindable. Can someone point me to the chapter where an upgrade from 7.1 to this version is covered?
You're right. What I meant was that doing your regular system updates is enough to upgrade from 7.1 to 7.3, there's nothing special you need to do on top of that.
The difference between 'dist-upgrade' and 'upgrade' is that 'dist-upgrade' will install new dependencies (additional methods) if necessary, while 'upgrade' holds back new versions of packages that add new dependencies.
Between point releases, there really shouldn't be new dependencies. Maybe if some library is found to be totally broken from a security point of view it is replaced by another, but that happens very rarely.
So usually, the two commands do exactly the same thing for point release upgrades.
Some packages will be held back by apt-get until you "dist-upgrade" them and apt-get will notify you of the held back packages when you apt get "upgrade".
If you get a lot of packages that it tries to uninstall. That's basically what dist-upgrade does: tries to uninstall the least number of packages to allow the update through.
It never happens with a point release though - they are careful about that.
dist-upgrade does not mean distribution upgrade, it just handles additional dependencies after an upgrade and it may remove some packages if necessary.
There doesn't seem to be anything that jumps out as a reason to use aptitude over apt-get there. It mentions that the defaults for upgrading the distro are better for aptitude but doesn't say why or what differences there are.
I can see the search being useful though.
Seeing as my muscle memory is set at apt-get, i'll stick with it for the moment.
There was a brief time when aptitude was smarter than apt-get (it was smart enough to remove auto-installed dependencies when you removed a package, for example). During that time, the advice was to use aptitude instead of apt-get.
Those smarts were later moved to apt itself, but it's still a part of the folklore.
If you're already on a 7.x install (codename 'wheezy') then per http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214 it suffices to enable the updates repository (which I believe is the default) and run `apt-get upgrade`.
The release notes you linked to are for the original 7.0 release. I think that most people will pretty much ignore that there's a point release and continue to update their systems regularly -- unless you're installing a large number of systems or have particular requirements there seems little point in paying it specific attention.
You don't need that upgrade. The only difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade is that dist-upgrade can add and remove packages, while upgrade will decline to make any upgrades that would require this. As such, dist-upgrade is almost always the one you meant.
In my experience, there's value in doing a standard upgrade before a dist-upgrade. It seems to help to fully update the system doing "upgrade" before "doing the upgrade" (dist-upgrade) that will uninstall things... That said, it can obviously be a bit of a waste to upgrade everything like gnome just to uninstall it immediately... As such, I typically manually uninstall large tasks then upgrade then dist-upgrade and manually add the tasks back. In "theory" it should just be as you say - one big dist-upgrade - but I've yet to encounter an upgrade that didn't need special attention and I have learned that minimizing the installed base being upgraded is a good first step to a smooth transition.
Any time this happens it is a bug. I hope that you reported them. I've never had this kind of issue with Debian stable (other Debian derivatives may be less reliable, and if you're running sid you're expected to fix it yourself).
To clarify: dist-upgrade upgrades everything, including installing or removing new dependencies. Upgrade upgrades the installed packages, but doesn't add or remove new packages. In theory only using "upgrade" is supposed to be safer (eg more unlikely to break something) but I have not encountered any problems when using dist-upgrade (disclaimer: when you rely on the standard distro repositories; if you use unstable programs/repos or 3rd party repos/PPAs in Ubuntu, it is more likely that dist-upgrade breaks something).
But I do not agree with what ksdkkdddd said. There is not really a use to do upgrade and then dist-upgrade right after it, because upgrade doesn't magically fix something in case dist-upgrade breaks something. It works or it does not. Also if you use apt from the terminal (as you should) and not rely on graphical updaters you always get output on what may prevent upgrading and how to resolve it.
In my experience a package's ability to cope with a complex uninstall scenario generally improves with the initial upgrade - or any upgrade for that matter - (for example, sometimes dist-upgrade-specific issues are only discovered by the maintainer as part of the coordination for a release) and so (in my experience) the reliability of the "dist-upgrade" is usually increased by doing an "upgrade" first. Dist-upgrade is one of those things that "should work" of it's own accord, but there are ways of increasing the odds; I have found a pre-"dist-upgrade" upgrade is one. (Sometimes I'm impatient and only upgrade apt/aptitude before a dist-upgrade though.)
I would say it makes more of a difference on systems that are infrequently upgraded in general since a few points away from the current versions aren't going to contain many differences anyways, but I'd certainly be more hesitant to dist-upgrade from a .0 release (6.0 to 7.x, for example). I'd almost rather clean-install in that scenario since it amounts to a similarly-sized download.
Just doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade should be enough. You have to be careful, do backups and all that, but that's basically all you need to do.
It has already been said, but this is just a point release. If you keep your Debian system up to date (which you should) you'll only get a few new packages.
I recently gave Debian a try and one thing that surprised me, coming from Arch, is that the tool to install software, apt-get, can't list what software has already been installed. You have to use dkpg to get that information.
Even funnier, I found the answer for that on the Arch Wiki page on Pacmac Rosetta:
Sort of makes sense if you consider the history behind it: dpkg installs software, not apt-get. apt-get, aptitude, etc. are higher-level dependency resolution tools that simply loop in dpkg to actually install packages. dselect is an older tool that did dependencies before apt-get came around.
RPM distros are similar, as they use higher-level tools to do dependencies (yum, zypper, etc.; there was even apt for RPM) and then RPM to actually install the packages and track them.
Admittedly though Debian's command line tools are stuck in the past in this regard, as the user shouldn't need to care about all this. Arch gets this right by putting it all into pacman.
Debian (and Ubuntu etc.) has a tool available that unifies all the many different commands required for administrating and querying the package system. It's called "wajig". I don't believe it's installed by default, though. I rarely see it suggested, probably because whenever people complain about the complexity of the command-line tools, the answer they get is "use the GUI tools".
I don't understand what is surprising or funny about that. It's pure Unix philosophy, different commands within a coherent management system.
The opposite would be the surprising thing, this is not Windows. There are managers that do the whole thing in one single executable that calls others, even with GUIs etc, for dumb people.
No it's not, it's just how things turned out. The different commands have a whole bunch of separate options, and the fact that they turned out to be split upon certain lines isn't a reflection of some "philosophy". (Also, I'm glad you find it so easy to find ways to convince yourself you're not a dumb person.)
Debian is pretty much the only "major" distro that does sensible package management and history shows it just beats the rest at what it does. Other than Debian, I value Slackware because its approach works for what it does. These two make Gentoo and Arch pointless. Ubuntu and Mint work differently and with different goals. I can also rescue Puppy, SLAX, and Stalix. Rest I've tried are basically a waste of time and a result of not knowing what's out there combined with "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
It's helpful to note that "aptitude" could fulfill 99% of the tasks in that "Rosetta" as well (so you could mostly use only a single tool to perform all the required tasks), though I appreciate the fact that they usually provided the lowest-level command to perform the single action.
Since I do apt-get update && apt-get upgrade almost regularly, I found out that my system was already running 7.3 (cat /etc/debian_version). So yes, this is not a major upgrade release just that the Debian team thought that there were enough changes and bug fixes to label this as a new release.
Can anyone point me to a step by step for how to get debian running on a macbook air? I've googled it and tried at least 4 different approaches, to no avail. I'm talking about a macbookair3,1 (late 2010 11").
Try it on a VM like VirtualBox (free, OS X supported). Among the advantages, you get vastly superior hardware support, particularly with the trackpad.
Source: Running Debian Wheezy on a 2011 Air.
edit to add: Here's a quick list what running Debian on a VM gives you:
* Seamless full-screen linux with full hardware access (e.g. GPU)
* Advantage of native OS X drivers (particularly the amazing trackpad -- linux drivers crippled it in my experience)
* Instant, lag-free transition between linux/OS X -- e.g. four-finger "swipe" gesture between desktops.
* Shared linux/OS X filesystem ("shared folders")
* Zero hassle with linux wifi, custom bootloader hacks (rEFIt), etc. VirtualBox has first-class support in Debian -- everything's just an apt-get away: https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox
However, performance is shite. I ended up going for a native install and you can appreciate the difference. That is, if you run Gnome 3 (which is a pile of shite as well). When on other DMs, if you can call xmonad a dm, virtual box was just awesome, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
I'd recommend using Debian testing instead of stable for that.
(testing is preferred in most personal use cases if you don't run in a corporate environment/server or similar)
I thought unstable was more geared toward personal use cases. Testing doesn't even get supported by the security team, that seems like a huge mistake to run as your personal workstation.
I remember when I was messing around a few years ago I had to use a bootloader called refit, which is now forked to refind at http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
It's been too long since I used a Mac, but if someone wants to donate a recent Macbook to me I'm happy to get Debian set up and blog about it ;)
Not sure about the airs, but on the 2011 macbook pro, you could boot a lot of things from cd, but not from USB. Apple doesn't have a very good pre-boot environment if you're not running Apple software. (No PXE, either, just their proprietary netboot)
