Cannot upgrade Dapper->Edgy without update-manager

[R. Nortman]

Binary package hint: apt

According to the official Edgy upgrade instructions (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdgyUpgrades), the only supported way to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy is to use the update-manager. Updating by manually editing sources.list and using apt-get dist-upgrade is specifically said to be unreliable, though no details are given on what might break or how to fix it. I manage several boxes which are headless and do not even have the X client libraries installed, let alone gtk, so I cannot install update-manager. It seems completely unreasonable to install all those libraries simply to be able to do the update.

So to make a long story short -- there does not seem to be a supported way of upgrading a text-only system to Edgy. This might be simply a documentation bug.

[Freddy Martinez (freddymartinez9)]

Updated the page, that was a very good bug report, thank you for bring that to our attention.

[Freddy Martinez (freddymartinez9)]

Please say update on the https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdgyUpgrades page, I will be emailing the documentation team, and you should get an email soon about it)

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Please note that we are working on a server upgrade tool that brings the benefits of update-manager to the server:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerUpgradeTool

I think the documentation should be made more clear. Update-manager is strongly recommended, but apt-get dist-upgrade should will still work. You need to careful check what it wants to do and check the release notes. Stuff that update-manager is doing mostly automatically.

Cheers,
 Michael

P.S. Thanks Freddy for brining this to the attention of the doc team!

[Matthew East (mdke)]

Michael, can you update the documentation?

Since the warning complained of in this bug was written and endorsed by mdz, and came about due to the number of people who used apt to upgrade to Edgy and found themselves with a broken system, I think we'd prefer it if you took care of amending the warning.

[Tollef Fog Heen (tfheen)]

Bringing milestone forward

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

In feisty we have a server upgrade tool now.