Updates held back?

[Kilwillie]

I just moved from Mint 17.3 to UM 16.04.1 Other than a few minor niggles I was able to figure out, it’s been a great experience. A question I have though:

Software Updater says my system is up-to-date, however when I run apt list --upgradable in Terminal, I get the following results:

Listing… Done
init/xenial-updates 1.29ubuntu3 amd64 [upgradable from: 1.29ubuntu2]
init-system-helpers/xenial-updates,xenial-updates 1.29ubuntu3 all [upgradable from: 1.29ubuntu2]
libnm-glib-vpn1/xenial-updates 1.2.2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 amd64 [upgradable from: 1.2.0-0ubuntu0.16.04.3]
libnm-glib4/xenial-updates 1.2.2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 amd64 [upgradable from: 1.2.0-0ubuntu0.16.04.3]
libnm-util2/xenial-updates 1.2.2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 amd64 [upgradable from: 1.2.0-0ubuntu0.16.04.3]
libnm0/xenial-updates 1.2.2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 amd64 [upgradable from: 1.2.0-0ubuntu0.16.04.3]
linux-firmware/xenial-updates,xenial-updates 1.157.4 all [upgradable from: 1.157.3]
network-manager/xenial-updates 1.2.2-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 amd64 [upgradable from: 1.2.0-0ubuntu0.16.04.3]
xserver-common/xenial-updates,xenial-updates 2:1.18.4-0ubuntu0.1 all [upgradable from: 2:1.18.3-1ubuntu2.2]
xserver-xorg-core/xenial-updates 2:1.18.4-0ubuntu0.1 amd64 [upgradable from: 2:1.18.3-1ubuntu2.2]

So I was wondering is UM configured to hold back some updates in the way Mint is?

[Bill_MI]

Hi @Kilwillie,

I asked basically the same thing a while back about Synaptic which behaves the same as apt:

Software Updater vs. Synaptic

Help my curiosity and start a discussion? System is a VirtualBox VM running UM 16.04 64-bit while I get set to install on my main machines soon. As I write this, Synaptic reports 43 upgradeable packages while Software Updater reports only 8. As an experiment, I used Synaptic to update only the 8 and sure enough... Software Updater was satisfied all was up to date. This left 35 packages still pending in Synaptic and most were bug fixes and enhancements upstream. I assume the differe…

It’s not like Mint which usually has an upgrade to the Updater that is done by itself first, before other updates. It’s like the Updater code has to first get ready to handle the pending updates.

Instead, Ubuntu (and -Mate) has a combination of extra roll-out protection and bandwidth staggering on non-critical upgrades. You should never see this difference on critical or security updates.

Hope this makes sense.

[wizd3m]

Kept back updates could be the result of an application you installed has an update available but one of its dependencies has not been upgraded yet. So the applications will not be upgraded until the dependencies are.

Well, that should now be clear. No?

Ok, an example: Gimp. Let’s say there is a new version available and it depends on the latest version of libwmf. Even better, without the latest version of libwmf Gimp simply won’t work. This means that libwmf has to be updated before Gimp can. So Gimp will be kept back until libwmf is upgraded.

My advice: Just wait it out.