"Held back" updates...

What command(s) did you use?

Historically it meant there was an unsatisfiable dependency. It could mean that the depdency (or a suitable version of it) is completely unavailable, or that it’s available but for some reason not installable or upgradable.

Currently it can also mean that the upgrade is being phased and it’s not your turn yet. I think the diagnostic for this is being improved.

The usual, sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade

It does seem that upgrades trickle in slowly, as advertised by the "update available" icon. It seems as if there needs to be some additional information offered on when to upgrade and/or reboot.

Thanks for writing,

bob prohaska

I would suggest using ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’, if upgrading manually, because:

(1) ‘apt upgrade’ will currently never remove a package, even if that’s necessary to upgrade something else.

(2) ‘apt’ is permitted to meaning from version to version, so any advice given about it today could be invalidated tomorrow.

When to upgrade:

• I use
  formatting link
  which takes most of the hassle out of it.

When to reboot:

• /var/run/reboot-required should be nonempty if you need a reboot.
• formatting link
  should help with reboot notifications.
• unattended-upgrades mentions any need to reboot in its email notifications.

Thank you very much! I wasn't aware of the nuances you've presented. For now /var/run/reboot-required doesn't exist. I'll start checking it regularly.

bob prohaska

unattended-upgrades is telling me about has raspberrypi-ui-mods too (now that I look at my cron mail). The answer is that other packages need to be installed and removed in order to satisfy the new version’s dependencies:

$ really apt-get dist-upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required: lxplug-network Use 'apt autoremove' to remove it. The following packages will be REMOVED: lxplug-ptbatt The following NEW packages will be installed: lxplug-batt lxplug-cpu wfplug-batt The following packages will be upgraded: raspberrypi-ui-mods 1 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 1,113 kB of archives. After this operation, 260 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n]