As mentioned previously, itis simple to update your system. The commands (or menu items) for upgrading your system to the next official release are different from the standard updating commands. The apt-get command dist-upgrade or the aptitude full-upgrade will perform the necessary special calculations to upgrade to the next major distribution release after the package information cache has been updated (either using the normal update command if you have configured the release name as stable, or after changing to the new release name and executing the update command). The reason for the special commands is that there are major changes in package dependencies between official releases, and the way some software is configured, as well as the removal of obsolete packages, all of which require special calculations not involved in a normal package upgrade.
Synaptic can also handle a full distribution upgrade, but instead of a different command, it handles such upgrades when 'smart upgrade' is set in Preferences instead of 'default upgrade'.
