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I am on Ubuntu MATE 22.04. After a sudo apt update and sudo apt list --upgradable I get the following output:

apt-utils/jammy-updates 2.4.8 amd64 [upgradable from: 2.4.7]
apt/jammy-updates 2.4.8 amd64 [upgradable from: 2.4.7]
libapt-pkg6.0/jammy-updates 2.4.8 amd64 [upgradable from: 2.4.7]

When I try to upgrade with sudo apt upgrade, all 3 packages are kept back.

If I do sudo nala upgrade instead (nala is just another frontend for apt that I prefer because it is more informative), it explains why some of the packages are kept back:

The following packages were kept back:
apt
└── apt conflicts with apt-transport-https

libapt-pkg6.0
└── libapt-pkg6.0 (!= 2.4.8) will break libapt-pkg


Nala was unable to determine why these were held:
  apt-utils

I am confused about the reason that apt is being kept back. It says that apt conflicts with apt-transport-https, but as far as I can tell, apt-transport-https is not installed on my system.

Output of dpkg -l apt-transport*:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                Version      Architecture Description
+++-===================-============-============-=================================
un  apt-transport-https <none>       <none>       (no description available)

Output of apt-cache policy libapt-pkg6.0:

libapt-pkg6.0:
  Installed: 2.4.7
  Candidate: 2.4.8
  Version table:
     2.4.8 500 (phased 40%)
        500 http://mirror.il-jr.kamatera.com/ubuntu jammy-updates/main amd64 Packages
 *** 2.4.7 100
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.4.5 500
        500 http://mirror.il-jr.kamatera.com/ubuntu jammy/main amd64 Packages

Output of dpkg -l | grep libapt-pkg:

ii  libapt-pkg-perl                          0.1.40build2                            amd64        Perl interface to libapt-pkg
ii  libapt-pkg6.0:amd64                      2.4.7                                   amd64        package management runtime library
ii  python-apt-common                        2.3.0ubuntu2.1                          all          Python interface to libapt-pkg (locales)
ii  python3-apt                              2.3.0ubuntu2.1                          amd64        Python 3 interface to libapt-pkg

I believe that this issue is not related to phased updates for two reasons:

  1. From my experience, if packages are held back because of phased updates then nala doesn't specify a reason why they are held back.
  2. I added the 99-Phased-Updates file to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d to disable phased updates and the issue persists.

Can someone explain this behavior and how to resolve this?

Artur Meinild
  • 31,035
Saar Koren
  • 46

1 Answers1

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It looks like despite the the reasons I had to think the packages were being kept back for some reason other than phased updates, phased updates actually were the cause.

Disabling phased updates using a file in the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ directory as suggested in What are phased updates, and why does Ubuntu use them? did not work for me, but running sudo apt -o APT::Get::Always-Include-Phased-Updates=true full-upgrade as suggested by @Artur Meinild did install all three packages.

The main confusion here was because nala gave me different reasons to why the packages were being held back. I will report this as a bug.

Saar Koren
  • 46