Another way to manage a Kanotix hard disk installation

One point of view that I obtained from a very experienced Debian sysadmin is that apt-get dist-upgrade is the easiest way, but doesn't necessarily yield a coherent system as it ignores dependencies. This same point of view recommends the use of apt-get upgrade in conjunction with apt-listbugs∞ and apt-listchanges∞. Neither of those was installed by default on my Kanotix hard disk install.

So the first order of business is installing them, apt-listbugs has a hidden dependency on reportbug∞ so that should be installed as well:

:code:apt-get install reportbug apt-listbugs apt-listchanges:code:
I configured apt-listchanges to use the pager to display changes.

Now you can do the usual:

:code:apt-get update:code:
Then when you do

:code:apt-get -u upgrade:code:
apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges will be invoked automatically, allowing you to weigh up how safe a particular package upgrade is on your system and act accordingly.

A less unstable unstable∞ discusses this approach further, but is out of date regarding holding a package.