One of Debian's key features is its upgrade mechanism. So one can
upgrade an older Debian system without reinstalling everything. We
wanted to make this upgrade procedure as smooth as possible, but some
special precautions still are reuired.

To upgrade from 1.1 or 1.2 make sure to install the following, by hand
after first clearing the available file as follows:

	dpkg --clear-avail
	dpkg -i ldso<version>.deb
	dpkg -i libc5<version>.deb
	dpkg -i dpkg<version>.deb
	dpkg --purge --force-depends texbin
	dselect

Any move from a previous release version will REQUIRE the upgrade of dpkg
before additional packages can be upgraded. This is because of the fact
that dpkg didn't work with epochs (a method of reseting version numbering)
and the version in this release can deal with them. Dpkg depends on libc5
and it is always a good idea to upgrade ldso before any other package.

Once the dselect phase has begun the user must be prepaired to run install
"many" times to resolve the dependency conflicts. When I did a standard
upgrade of the 1.1.13 release to 1.3, Install had to be run four times
before all packages upgraded. Although this process generates lots of
errors they should, for the most part, be totally ignored, as they are
artifacts of package order during the install phase.

The above facts need to be heavily advertised on debian-user during the
following weeks. Feel free to redistribute the above information whenever
you wish to answer these questions for others.


