Comparison of synaptic functions and traditional commands

[Dedeco Balaco]

Hello,

I would like to know if synaptic has everything needed to upgrade a Debian machine. The official Debian documentation gives us commands to upgrade the system to new releases. Doing this upgrade, i discovered that the commands that we must do are:

1. Making sure that every possible package installed is updated with the current available releases.

2. Optionally, we can do some commands

apt-mark hold <packages>

to freeze some packages. But this must be done carefully because it may block the whole upgrade process.

3. Then, we edit '/etc/apt/sources.list' to deactivate every third party source.

4. Then, we do

apt upgrade

for the current system.

5. Documentation also says we must do

apt full-upgrade

command, after the previous one.

6. Now, we change the '/etc/apt/sources.list' file to use the next release package sources. This is really important: if we will upgrade from Debian 8 to Debian 10, we cannot go directly to Debian 10, risking that something gets broken in the changes.

7. So, with the new '/etc/apt/sources.list', we repeat steps 1 to 5 until we reach the wanted release. After this happens, we reactivate the third party sources, so those softwares can be updated too, if needed. Debian has Long Term Support (LTS) releases. We do not need to upgrade the whole system at every new release. We can update just security patches that are eventually found.

Now, my question here is: of the commands we have and use in Debian, which of their functions are completely available in synaptic? For example, if i click on the button "mark every possible updates", and then apply it, is it equivalent of doing an

apt full-upgrade

command?

synaptic helps us editing the '/etc/apt/sources.list' file, which is great. But does it have all other functions necessary to upgrade a system?

Thank you for your attention,

Dedeco