...
I hope the release for update will come soon, but 80+ around to be removed remain like concrete.
Is there any expectation whether we talk about days or weeks to get d-u released?
...
AFAIK the list will never again drop to "0 to remove", because several packages and libraries get really
replaced by others with a similar name, sometimes carrying an aditional "5" in it. So you have to go thoroughly through your list and watch if some of the 'to be removed' ones have a matching candidate in the 'newly installed' section.
This is definitely not a clear-to-go advice . It is a matter of every individual installation and software selection, combined with architecture and sources.list, spiced with desktop environment and drivers, if a dist-upgrade will be relatively save or at least repairable now or if it will go nuts. As the transition tracker is still around 40% today, most of the standard major packages seem done, but not all. From my very personal observation, LXDE and Cinnamon were safe to go these days. KDE pure debian needed some manual workarounds and dpkg-tricks before it worked. KDEnext on siduction repos is under progress, Santa is working at providing a clean upgrade path. But even if he announces this thread as [solved] some day, that does not mean that the devs know that every single one of your personally installed packages is safe then.
As for
apt upgrade , jaegermeister is generally right that in rolling unstable
dist-upgrade is the supported way to go, but such a transition is a special situation. So apt upgrade as
intermediate step before the next dist-upgrade might be a valid option to update some packages that seem save without removal. But still,
not without having a tested
backup available.