I’m a newbie initially installed Server 22.04.5 LTS no desktop environment, have kept it basically updated with no (known) train wrecks. Am now preparing to update to 24.04.3 LTS. Self help documentation has made it crystal clear to have all packages updated before release updates, but I’m stuck at the following, not knowing if it’s critical to resolve, or maybe disregard and snow plow into the release update …
sudo apt update returns 8 packages can be upgraded
sudo apt upgrade returns the 8 packages have been “kept back” and “not upgraded”
Here’s revealing I’m a blind squirrel looking for nuts … all of these packages reference ‘amd64’ … but this hardware is a Lenovo ThinkPad workstation with an Intel i7 Core processor.
If these are AMD processor packages
… do I really care about them? … might they have functionality with an Intel processor? … in that case still find a way to upgrade?
… is it important to clean them out before a version release update?
… can I safely ignore them and proceed to a version release update?
Or if this has nothing to do with AMD processors I’m even more lost.
This is my first post, I’ll apologize in advance (1) if the format is messy, and/or (2) there is a post somewhere I missed that might explain this. I have tried searching (for this scenario) but there’s so much conversation none of it seemed applicable. I’ll certainly take feedback to learn better searching techniques.
Thank you in advance to anyone who can provide some guidance to proceed. Thanks again!
you will find that some of those packages will be upgraded. Some may be deferred due to phasing and some are held back.
Phasing is a policy where, let us say, 10% of users get the upgrades and if they do not complain, then a further 10% will get the upgrade and so on until the upgrade packages are sent out to all Ubuntu users.
Whereas, a package is held back because it depends on other packages that also need upgrading but their upgrades are not ready.
This is how I, as an ordinary user, understand these messages and the update/upgrade methods of the Ubuntu developers.
The apt list - - upgradable command does not give this information.
To get all available updates you really want to use full-upgrade not just upgrade… see the apt manpage:
upgrade (apt-get(8))
upgrade is used to install available upgrades of all packages currently installed on the system from
the sources configured via sources.list(5). New packages will be installed if required to satisfy
dependencies, but existing packages will never be removed. If an upgrade for a package requires the
removal of an installed package the upgrade for this package isn't performed.
When a package is supplied as an argument, the package will be installed prior to the upgrade
action.
full-upgrade (apt-get(8))
full-upgrade performs the function of upgrade but will remove currently installed packages if this
is needed to upgrade the system as a whole.
When a package is supplied as an argument, the package will be installed prior to the upgrade
action.
There is a shorter version that does the same thing:
sudo apt upgrade ~U
Under normal circumstances, though, you’re strongly recommended not to do this.
As always when running installations or major upgrades, even though they’ve been well tested, please ensure that your daily backup is fully up-to-date and tested, otherwise you risk data loss.
Thank you everyone for the information, I will definitely be compiling all of this for future reference. You’ve all answered many questions … thank you, thank you!
@eeickmeyer - I would have thought the ‘amd’ packages to be excluded from Intel machines. Using the term “Intel compatible” would mean they can still be used on Intel machines? … that drastically changes my understanding of this whole thing.
@rubi1200 - The upgrade ‘howto’ you mention is exactly what led me to get hung up to get all of the packages updated before attempting a distribution upgrade, I’ll stay on this track.
@graymech - For all of the ‘phasing’ references now it makes sense. As you mention, the result of ‘sudo apt upgrade’ did not reference anything about phasing, only “kept back” and “not upgraded”. I’ll refrain from trying to figure out what packages are phased, hopefully I stay at the back of the line to get them last … hah!
@ogra - I’ll keep ‘full-upgrade’ in my back pocket for future use, or sparingly to start. If I had the time I’d look up the gory details of these eight packages to ponder the importance of forcing an upgrade. At some point I’ll find myself backed into a corner to figure it out.
@paddylandau - It doesn’t sound like there’s a compelling reason to force those package updates, so I’ll proceed to my goal to simply get the distribution release updated. I appreciate you putting things into this perspective, I’ll definitely add this syntax in my reference collection.
If you’re interested, you can find a list of the released phased packages, showing how far they’ve come so far, and which ones have been suspended due to errors.
