How to make apt auto-upgrade packages even when a depends package is removed/renamed?

Anton Tykhyy

7/24/24, 5:14 PM

Normal unattended-upgrades keeps back packages when a Depends package is removed/renamed. This is usually reasonable, but I would like to override this behavior, as it can lead to breakage which can be hard to detect/fix if it occurs in a cloud virtual machine that one isn't regularly interacting with. Is it possible to tell unattended-upgrades to not keep back such packages? (Note: I am not asking about phased upgrades.)

Specifically I had dotnet-runtime-7.0 auto-upgrade to a newer version while dotnet-hostfxr-7.0 was kept back due to one of its Depends being renamed. This broke dotnet and applications using the runtime as dotnet could no longer find the runtime (dotnet --list-runtimes returned nothing). While correcting this manually, I had the following output:

$ sudo apt upgrade aspnetcore-runtime-7.0
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
aspnetcore-runtime-7.0 is already the newest version (7.0.109-0ubuntu1~22.04.1).
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  dotnet-host dotnet-hostfxr-7.0
...
$ sudo apt upgrade dotnet-hostfxr-7.0
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  dotnet-host
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  dotnet-host-7.0
The following packages will be upgraded:
  dotnet-hostfxr-7.0
1 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
1 standard LTS security update
Need to get 342 kB of archives.
...

0 + 5

upgrade

package-management

apt

unattended-upgrades

user535733

7/24/24, 10:08 PM

"*Normal apt auto-upgrade keeps back upgrades when a Depends package is removed/renamed.*" Well.... Apt uninstalls packages when their dependencies are removed. It "keeps back" upgrades only in the sense that the upgrade-able package is not installed at all. You cannot eat my lunchtime banana when my lunchbox contains only sandwiches. "Renaming" a dependency is similar to removing it. If apt depends upon Foo, then it wants Foo and nothing else.

guiverc

7/25/24, 12:43 AM

I don't really understand your issue, but re-packaging what annoys you to your own requirements seems to me the most logical answer (*given you appear to want different rules than the current packager(s)*)

Anton Tykhyy

7/25/24, 5:00 AM

Maybe I was not clear. I installed `dotnet-runtime-7.0` which depends on `dotnet-hostfxr-7.0` which depended on `dotnet-host`. Auto-upgrades installed upgrades to all these packages until the version of `dotnet-hostfxr-7.0` which stopped depending on `dotnet-host` and started depending on `dotnet-host-7.0` (thanks, MS). At that point `dotnet-host` and `dotnet-hostfxr-7.0` were kept back and no longer auto-upgraded.

muru

7/25/24, 5:18 AM

What do you mean by "auto-upgraded"? `unattended-upgrades`? Anyway, if an update needs the installation or removal of a package, the commands to use would be `apt full-upgrade` or `apt-get dist-upgrade`.

Anton Tykhyy

7/25/24, 5:41 AM

Yes, probably unattended-upgrades. Can it be configured to install updates that need package removal, like the one in the example? I can't require people to run upgrades on my appliance VMs manually. I suppose I could run `apt full-upgrade` every day as a cron job, but it would be better to configure unattended-upgrades.

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