upgrade-process in MX-Linux: full upgrade" is the full equivalent to "apt-get dist-upgrade"

[dil_bert]

hello dear friends - 

 

i mused bout the update &/  upgrade-process in MX-Linux. 

 

and i guess that we can say: *"full upgrade" is the full equivalent to "apt-get dist-upgrade"*

 

taken from here:  https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=45813

Just as a general question, with updates on MX 17, I always do the full upgrade which I guess is equivalent to the terminal command 'sudo apt upgrade'.
No problem but why would it be recommended in this Debian based distro when it's definitely not recommended in Mint which uses Ubuntu? They claim it's more likely to break the system. Is this down to the difference between Debian and Ubuntu or are they being over cautious?

"full upgrade" is equivalent to "apt-get dist-upgrade".

and its recommended because antiX recommends it and we have an antiX base (antiX-core, heavily modified). dist-upgrade is also our default because its a more complete update.
mint and ubuntu allow ppa's, which would be included in any dist-upgrades they would be doing, so I can see how they might be a little more leary of that. third party repos can hose a debian system too, especially larger repos like deb-multimedia that have a lot of packages, but there are way more ppas in the wild on the ubuntu side of things.

Theoretically full-upgrade (or dist-upgrade) command is more dangerous than simple "upgrade" because "apt-get upgrade" never removes or adds packages while "apt-get full-upgrade" (or dist-upgrade) can remove and add packages.
If you don't mess with the sources we actually recommend full-upgrade because this way you get new packages we add or remove the obsolete ones. However, there are two pre-conditions: no monkeying with the sources, and reading and understanding the prompts. Also, I don't think full-upgrade is appropriate for auto upgrade for the second reason: you cannot really check the prompts, you'd have to assume "y" response which would be dangerous. Problems might show even if you don't monkey with the sources, if one source is down then you might pull only from another source and depending on dependency resolution you might have surprises (not entirely sure that can happen or that is likely, but logically it looks to me like a risk -- I guess you'd need to have a different version of the package in the secondary source that would somehow require removal of a package -- probably not likely).

I have always used Synaptic, since Mepis I think, although sometimes use the CLI method (often following an inadvertent mouse click...yeah...whatever...), or GDebi, when these appear via the forum for tweaks or tests. So I've never given much consideration to apt methods.
I think some version upgrades have specified apt upgrades for migrating, but I just tend to rely on the stability of Synaptic. I haven't needed to pin a version for donkey's (years) or do anything fancy.
Am I missing anything important or am I just just a typical, contented low-maintenance MX user? Interesting OP though, to make me think over my habits.

Synaptic in MX uses apt-get dist-upgrade by default as far as I know, so if you haven't had any issues, it shows that MX works fine with apt-get dist-upgrade, regardless of warnings in Ubuntu/Mint.
Of course, you are probably a model user who, like Adrian was saying, does not monkey around with sources. :p
By the way, I just upgrade my Mint 17 system all the time with apt-get dist-upgrade, without issue. But then, I don't use PPAs.

well - conclusio: i take the above mentioned process on commandline - and run it... - then all packages will update...