Debian – Will Debian Wheezy (stable) automatically upgrade to Jessie once Jessie becomes the stable release

debiandistributionsupgrade

I am on Debian Wheezy (stable) and routinely update my system via the basic:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

In the future, once Jessie becomes the stable release, I wonder whether Wheezy will automagically become Jessie if I keep doing dist-upgrade, or not.

Will there be ANY manual steps needed, to make sure to always be on the current Stable release (years into the future, e.g. Sid after Jessie), or am I set to go as I am?

E.g. do I have to modify my sources.list file in some sort of way to ensure Jessie will simply saunter in without any manual steps down the track, or will some 'big' update ('dist-upgrade') do it all for me and change all instances of wheezy to jessie when it knows to do so?

(Every single line in my sources.list has wheezy in it. Perhaps I need only remove wheezy from them?)

I am a bit of a newcomer (from OS X, and before that Windows), so am not sure how 'release upgrades' on the same channel can be done automatically on Debian – where, OS X simply offers, via its automatic updates, full upgrades to its next (stable/ready) release with no manual checking required or complicated steps apart from normal system update checking.

Best Answer

If the lines in your sources.list say "wheezy", you will stay with Wheezy even when Jessie is released. If you change those lines to say "stable" instead, apt will upgrade you to Jessie when it's released, because "stable" will become an alias for "jessie" instead of "wheezy". (And if you change those lines to say "jessie", you'll upgrade to Jessie now, even though it's still in testing and hasn't been released as "stable" yet.)

Although it may be tempting to change your sources.list to say "stable" so that you upgrade to new stable releases automatically, I don't recommend it. The upgrade process may have special steps you'll want or need to do in addition to (and possibly before) upgrading packages, so it's better to wait for Jessie to be released and then look at the release notes before making the switch. (In practice, just upgrading the packages is usually okay, but it's safer to wait and read the release notes first. Look before you leap.)

BTW, Sid will never become a stable release. It's the permanent name of the "unstable" repository, and doesn't participate in the progression of names through the "testing" and "stable" aliases. After Jessie is released, some other Toy Story character will be chosen for the new "testing", and Sid will remain unstable as ever.

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