I’ve done etch upgrades in the past (i.e. before etch came out), and they were sometimes quite hairy. Especially the transition from ssh to openssh-server and openssh-client. I had a few broken upgrades…

Since etch has come out, I’ve been upgraded a few machines, and it’s a piece of cake. In fact the CLUG webserver and backup-server have been upgraded.

My servers tend to use custom kernels without initrds, so upgrading is quite simple. The release notes seem to cover it pretty well. There are only a couple of gotchas I’ve had:

Upgrade vim with an aptitude install vim before you do any dist-upgrading. Personally, I like to use vimdiff for configuration file changes. This means I can keep the configuration file format and comments of the latest package, and my configuration changes from when the machine was originally set up. If vim is half installed, you can’t run vimdiff…

When you are done, you might need to purge hotplug:

You can also remove non-US from your sources.list.