Hi,

Didier Kryn <kryn@???> writes:

> Le 06/11/2025 à 11:56, Antony Stone a écrit :
>> On Thursday 06 November 2025 at 11:49:48, Didier Kryn wrote:
>>

>>>       Ah! I always wondered what apt brought in that was better than
>>> apt-get. Is there anything other than a different and misleading wording?
>> I don't believe that was the distinction being made.

>>
>> As far as I know, "apt upgrade" and "apt-get upgrade" do the same thing as
>> each other.
>>
>> Similarly, "apt dist-upgrade" and "apt-get dist-upgrade" do the same thing as
>> each other.
>>
>> The difference is that using "upgrade" stays on the current release version,
>> whereas "dist-upgrade" takes you to the next release.
>>
>     Are you meaning that you can have the old and new distros declared
> in the sources.list?

Yes you can. I almost habitually do this for machines tracking testing
so I get whatever security upgrades are available for stable. These may
occasionally have dependencies that are only in stable so you get an APT
sources file that looks like

  Types: deb
  URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged
  Suites:
    freia
    excalibur-security
    excalibur-updates
    excalibur
  Components: main non-free-firmware
  Signed-By:
   /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/devuan-keyring-freia-archive.asc
   /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/devuan-keyring-excalibur-archive.asc
   /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/devuan-keyring-2016-archive.asc

# That last keyring file may not be necessary.

> I never tried to have two distros declared in the same time and wonder
> what would do "dist-upgrade" from the old distro (hopefully just
> upgrade), or "upgrade" before "dist-upgrade" from a new distro. Never
> tried these two combinations; I always changed the sources.list just
> before "dist-upgrade".
>
>     So what is the difference between "dist-upgrade" and
> "full-upgrade" in apt?

Based on their respective manual pages

apt full-upgrade

and

apt-get dist-upgrade

do the same thing. They upgrade your installed packages to their latest
versions that are available from the APT sources you have configured.
Both subcommands will if necessary remove packages, something that a
plain upgrade refuses to do.

Removals are more likely to be needed during upgrading from one release
to another which is probably why the sub-command started out life as
dist-upgrade. The fact is that removals may also be needed with point
upgrades or if you enable things like backports so full-upgrade covers
the functionality better.

>     I was ranting because I don't like that perfectly working tools
> are rewritten for just the sake of rewriting them. There should be a
> serious motivation to do such a thing. Motivations like more
> functionnalities, improved  UI, or better maintainability... but not
> just the fun of wasting one's time in rewriting, confusing users and
> creating new bugs.

Hope this unconfuses a bit,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen