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marianoju
Asked: 2019-10-19 03:08:56 +0800 CST

Why are upgradable packages not upgraded?

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Executing sudo apt update ended with 

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
2 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

Executing apt list --upgradable gave me 

Listing... Done
onionshare/bionic,bionic 2.2.ppa1-1 all [upgradable from: 2.1-1]
ring-all/unknown 20190927.2.c2af011~dfsg1-1 amd64 [upgradable from: 20190629.2.c07ef23~dfsg1-1]

But executing sudo apt upgrade does not upgrade the upgradable packages: 

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  1. Why is that? Unmet dependencies possibly?
  2. Can I (manually) upgrade the listed packages, and if so: how?

Update: See this pastebin for a full transcript.

updates upgrade apt

3 Answers

  1. You can run the command line below for upgrade all upgradable packages and their dependencies:

    sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
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  2. Best Answer

    In this case “upgradable packages” are actually not upgradable because they have unmet dependencies.

    To reproduce: try to update the specific packages in question (see How To Update A Specific Package In Ubuntu) by executing sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade <packagename>. If any package has unmet dependencies, the upgrade will fail due to

    E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

    Upgrading these packages would require to resolve the unmet dependencies. Information on that can be found in the answer to “How do I resolve unmet dependencies after adding a PPA?” and “Fixing Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages”.

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  3. I suggest running:

    sudo apt-get upgrade

    This worked for me. It will tell you how many packages it upgraded, how many new ones were installed, how many were deleted, and how many were not upgraded (kept back).

    I had packages that were kept back, so after reading this post, which provides multiple solutions, I ran the following to install the packages that were kept back:

    sudo apt-get --with-new-pkgs upgrade

    This will also include which packages are no longer needed and could be removed. Per the output's instructions, I ran the following to remove them:

    sudo apt autoremove

    Lastly I ran the first code again, just to make sure all was clear and would get the output "0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded."

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