Argh. If I'd known there were release notes, I might have read them! There's no obvious link to them from the front page of debian.org; even now I know they're there, I had to dig down through several links before I even found them. Another "Beware of the Leopard" moment :-/

Not that I want to imply that the Debian press officer is crap or anything, but, uh, well.

Hm. I clicked on "latest stable release" and there I was. "To upgrade from an older version of Debian...".

I'm not sure how to re-structure the front page to improve this.

It didn't occur to me to click on "latest stable release"; in fact I hadn't noticed it was even a hyperlink. I generally look for hyperlinks containing verbs, or words like "instructions", or things related to what I want to do, not random nouns that have something to do with what I'm about. Therefore my eyes were initially drawn to the next short paragraph: "If you'd like to start using Debian, you can easily obtain a copy, and then follow the installation instructions to install it." I read that bit, and decided it didn't relate to me because it was all about installing from scratch. If there'd been a bit next to that saying "Alternatively, if you're upgrading from an earlier release, do read the release notes or things might go horribly painfully wrong", I'd have noticed immediately.

There was a link to the release notes (and hence, after much burrowing as you say, to the relevant instructions—it took me a couple of goes to convince myself that I was barking up the right tree in trying to find them) in the release announcement (which is linked from the debian.org front page, and I picked up via debain-announce). I've not risked any of my machines yet, but seeing as the work box was installed as sarge-as-testing I'm not anticipating too many problems with that one at least….