upgrading between versions using apt

[Samuel Sieb]

Aaron Gaudio wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 17:07 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote:
> 
>>Is it possible to upgrade between full versions using apt?  For example 
>>from FC1 to FC2.  It upgraded most packages, although I had to do a lot 
>>of them in small chunks.  But now it's at a stage where it wants to 
>>delete a lot of necessary packages, including both installed kernels. 
>>I've tried this on several computers and on the one I really needed to 
>>be fully operational, I gave up and used the cd's to do a proper upgrade 
>>which worked just fine.  What does the installer do that just upgrading 
>>the packages using apt can not do?
> 
> I've used apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade from RH9 to FC1, to FC2 and
> now to FC3 test. In each case (especially RH9 to FC1) I've had to work
> on stuff myself to get the system fully up and ready. Unless you have
> quite a bit of experience (or are a fast user) I'd recommend using the
> CDs. At the mininimum, you'll probably need to 'apt-get install'
> individual packages that for one reason or another apt decided it needed
> to remove (though for FC1->FC2 there should not be many of these).
> 
This particular one is from FC1 to FC2.  I do have have a lot of Linux 
experience.  The particular hope here was to upgrade my server with the 
absolute minimum of downtime (preferably only a reboot).  That was the 
one that I eventually used the install cds to finish the job.

I now went and manually apt-get installed the packages that needed 
upgrading bit by bit.  Now, it is fully upgraded and doesn't try to 
remove anything.  It appears that it was a couple of packages that apt 
didn't want to automatically upgrade.  Once those were done, apt was 
happy.  Too bad I didn't try those ones first. :-/

Thanks for the encouragement. :-)