3

I ran apt upgrade the other day, and got this:

The following packages have been kept back:
  appstream

According to a related question somewhere on this site, appstream is safe to even remove.

How do I know if upgrading it is safe, and what will the upgrade actually change in my system? I'm assuming apt has kept it back for a reason, so I wanted to play safe before I run dist-upgrade.

Here's what changelog has to say:

appstream (0.10.6-1~ubuntu16.04.1) xenial-backports; urgency=medium

  * Backport to 16.04, with one change:
   - Lower the required Qt version to 5.4

 -- Iain Lane <iain@orangesquash.org.uk>  Wed, 01 Feb 2017 12:02:22 +0000

I'm assuming this won't brake anything?

apt-get -s dist-upgrade (even with sudo), as proposed by @muru, yielded nothing new, except the same old message that appstream has been kept back.

Here's the output of apt-get -s install appstream:

The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  gnome-software-common libgtkspell3-3-0 libsnapd-glib1 snapd-login-service
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED
  gnome-software ubuntu-software
The following packages will be upgraded:
  appstream
Gallifreyan
  • 317

1 Answers1

4

As per apt show appstream, version 0.10.16-1 of appstream breaks versions of gnome-software below 3.22.5-1, and the version of gnome-software in Xenial is 3.20.1. Hence, this version of appstream cannot be installed on a Xenial system together with gnome-software.

By the way, this seems like a good time to remember that backports are supposed to be installed manually on an as-needed basis. Although you can enable automatic installation of backports, you do so at your own risk, as it can cause issues like the one you are seeing now.

fkraiem
  • 12,813