05 September 2014

Now, the stable version of debian is ‘wheezy’, its former release is ‘squeeze’.
The purpose for me to upgrade my debian, from squeeze, wheezy to testing (sid),
is to install jekyll which depends on the Ruby 1.9.2 or newer.
And I found neither squeeze nor wheezy support the correct Ruby version.

Here might be a common way to upgrade from one debian release to another.

1. clear the original release

  apt-get update  # update the original package 
  apt-get upgrade # finish this to make a clear base to real upgrade
  apt-get dist-upgrade

2. make sure it is ready

aptitude

just press ‘g’, let it run by itself to clear all not finished task

3. change the /etc/apt/source.list to the next release name

we cannot jump over some release typically, well, I did not try this.

4. repeat the step 1.