This is a very contentious topic, you can see my initial take on this in https://blog.jak-linux.org/2023/10/10/a-case-for-different-upgrades/ https://blog.jak-

This is a very contentious topic, you can see my initial take on this in https://blog.jak-linux.org/2023/10/10/a-case-for-different-upgrades/ https://blog.jak-linux.org/2023/10/10/a-case-for-different-u... The problem is that's not really true. i.e. consider you get postfixed pulled in by postfix | mail-transport-agent and the new distro release changes it to exim4 | mail-transport-agent as we picked a new default MTA. Does this mean we should, by default, replace your MTA and require you to have to configure a different one? You will be able to do this (pick the same automatically installed packages given the same set of manually installed ones; installing missing Recommends, etc, by using --fix-policy and some more options perhaps). As for configuration this is worse, files managed by ucf have 3-way merging but it's not automatic and most configuration isn't managed by ucf but by dpkg.