apt-mess

Being totally new to Debian, this surely will sound funny to my future self, but still, I'm pretty confused by apt/Debian's package management.

So I want to go from stable to testing, which is easy right, it's all laid out in the docs: do an apt-setup noprobe to prepare for your install. Hm. Except that there is no apt-setup on my current system (which is Etch stable). Go look for such, with apt-cache search and dpkg -S and what not -- no luck. Then there's this Google-thing, that leads me to this nice page the content of which is a bit misleading but gives me a good kickstart. Turns out, all I have to do is replace my "stable" entries to "testing" in my source.lst file. Now, do I have to do an apt-get upgrade before my dist-upgrade or is it unnecessary. Official docs say I better do a genuine upgrade before the dist-upgrade, but hell, they even say I should use aptitude instead of apt-get and then I don't know a bit about the difference between the to.