Debian Reference
Chapter 5 - Upgrading a distribution to stable, testing, or unstable
Official release notes for upgrading are located at https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/releasenotes
and https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/releasenotes
(work in progress).
Upgrading a system to the stable, testing, or
unstable distribution may require several steps which must be in
the following order:
Debian does not support upgrades that skip intermediate releases.
5.1 Upgrading from Potato to Woody
This procedure is described separately because Potato's APT did not have all
the features described in the current apt_preferences(5) manpage.
After including only Woody sources in /etc/apt/sources.list,
upgrade APT and required core packages to Woody versions by doing the
following:
# apt-get update
# apt-get install libc6 perl libdb2 debconf
# apt-get install apt apt-utils dselect dpkg
Then upgrade the rest of the system to Woody.
# apt-get upgrade
# apt-get dist-upgrade
