> I can't even imagine how you would do a dist-upgrade from a liveCD in
> Debian. The closest I can get to that is either chroot-ing into the
> installed system or bind-mounting parts of /var to know which packages
> are installed.
I was imagining it as booting from the CD and skipping some stages. Note
that this wouldn't even be possible on any of the GUI-installer CDs,
(they totally lack the functionality) but with the older text-based
interface (as used by Ubuntu's 'server' and 'alternate' CDs and the most
recent Debian netinst/CD1 I used) you can skip out to a menu and skip
certain steps. (Or switch to a VC, and perform specific commands by hand
to meet the requirements of a step.)
The key requirement is whether the basic infrastructure is laid out so
as to over-write what is already there or whether it doesn't install
things to the filesystem until it starts processing the packages. If
it doesn't, say, reinitialize your dpkg database and stomp on your
/etc/passwd file then it just might work.
> PS. For the uninitiated, Debian has five repositories: oldstable,
> stable, testing, unstable and experimental. stable is the latest
> released version, oldstable is the previously released version, testing
> is the staging ground for the next release, unstable is software deemed
> acceptable for distribution that hasn't been in the archive (repository)
> long enough or has too many bugs to go into testing, and experimental is
> beta or pre-release software. stable is more appropriate for production
> systems and testing is better for hobbyists who need more current
> versions of software.
Well, sometimes they don't have 'oldstable'. I don't know if their
current release strategy will mean they're keeping it around, but
previously 'oldstable' had a limited life-time before it fell off the
mirrors. I imagine that with a quicker release cycle there would be more
demand for it.
Also, sometimes they have 'frozen' instead of 'testing'. They have
'frozen' when they're preparing for release and they're in a "feature
freeze" which is when only bug fixes are allowed (no new packages or
new versions of packages without special approval).
Cheers,
Steven Black
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