You're right. What I meant was that doing your regular system updates is enough to upgrade from 7.1 to 7.3, there's nothing special you need to do on top of that.

You are supposed to run those commands every day, not just with a point release.

When the newbie installed debian in the first place they were (should have been) told to do that.

(And yes there is a tool that will do it automatically and email you if there are updates - apticron.)

Isn't it:

  apt-get dist-upgrade

???

The difference between 'dist-upgrade' and 'upgrade' is that 'dist-upgrade' will install new dependencies (additional methods) if necessary, while 'upgrade' holds back new versions of packages that add new dependencies.

Between point releases, there really shouldn't be new dependencies. Maybe if some library is found to be totally broken from a security point of view it is replaced by another, but that happens very rarely.

So usually, the two commands do exactly the same thing for point release upgrades.

Not between point releases.