How To Apt-Get Update, Upgrade, Dist-Upgrade, Full-Upgrade and Their Similarities and Diffirencies

deb based distributions provides apt or apt-get to manage packages interactively and from network repositories. While updating packages update, upgrade or dist-upgrade can be used. But what is the difference between these two commands. In this tutorial we will look this issue.

Update

The real update operation will be down with upgrade command. This command will download packages and upgrade accordingly. So upgrade command will be run after update command. We should have root privileges in order to complete update operation so we will use sudo before upgrade command.

Upgrade

The real update operation will be down with upgrade command. This command will download packages and upgrade accordingly. So upgrade command will be run after update command. We should have root privileges in order to complete update operation so we will use sudo before upgrade command.

    upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages
    currently installed on the system from the sources enumerated in
    /etc/apt/sources.list. Packages currently installed with new
    versions available are retrieved and upgraded; under no
    circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or packages
    not already installed retrieved and installed. New versions of
    currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded without
    changing the install status of another package will be left at
    their current version. An update must be performed first so that
    apt-get knows that new versions of packages are available.

Dist-Upgrade

dist-upgrade command is very similar to upgrade command. This command will upgrade too but during upgrade there will be some prompts related with package configuration. In dist-upgrade this questions will be answered automatically by apt which will make our upgrade operation more easy and intelligent.

    dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade,
    also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions
    of packages; apt-get has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and
    it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the
    expense of less important ones if necessary. So, dist-upgrade
    command may remove some packages. The /etc/apt/sources.list file
    contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package
    files. See also apt_preferences(5) for a mechanism for overriding
    the general settings for individual packages.

Full-Upgrade

full-upgrade  is the same as dist-upgrade so we can use both command interchangeable.