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?
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/in...
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/in...
There's nothing special about upgrading Debian between point releases.
When the newbie installed debian in the first place they were (should have been) told to do that.
(And yes there is a tool that will do it automatically and email you if there are updates - apticron.)
apt-get dist-upgrade
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.
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
It never happens with a point release though - they are careful about that.
Better use 'aptitude':
sudo aptitude update && aptitude full-upgradeI've been using debian for years and always just used apt-get.
Furthermore:
http://superuser.com/questions/93437/aptitude-vs-apt-get-whi...
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.
Those smarts were later moved to apt itself, but it's still a part of the folklore.
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.
The notes I linked are the ones linked from the post page on where the upgrade instructions can be found.
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade
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.
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.