How to see why apt has a specific package version installed?

Question

When I run sudo apt upgrade, I get the following:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  wine-stable winehq-stable
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 2 not to upgrade.

If I try to sudo apt install wine-stable, it reports that there are broken dependencies:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
 wine-stable : Depends: wine-stable-i386 (= 5.0.0~bionic)
               Depends: wine-stable-amd64 (= 5.0.0~bionic) but 4.0.3~bionic is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

and despite "is to be installed", it transpires that version is already installed. I ran apt list -a wine-stable-amd64 and see:

Listing... Done
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 5.0.0~bionic amd64 [upgradable from: 4.0.3~bionic]
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 4.0.4~bionic amd64
wine-stable-amd64/bionic,now 4.0.3~bionic amd64 [installed,upgradable to: 5.0.0~bionic]
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 4.0.2~bionic amd64
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 4.0.1~bionic amd64
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 4.0~bionic amd64
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 3.0.5~bionic amd64
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 3.0.4~bionic amd64
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 3.0.3~bionic amd64
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 3.0.2~bionic amd64
wine-stable-amd64/bionic 3.0.1~bionic amd64

Now to my mind wine-stable-amd64 ought to just have updated itself to 5.0.0~bionic, so presumably some package or other is insisting it be held at 4.0.3~bionic. How do I see what package that is? I tried apt rdepends wine-stable-amd64 but the only package listed and installed that depends on it is...wine-stable! So what on earth is going on?

isn't winehq-stable a third-party package, removing it should release the hold — , Jun 04 '20 at 07:26

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 04 '20 at 06:34

sudo apt-get purge '^wine' sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get autoremove sudo apt-get clean sudo apt-get install wine sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

would be my best guess that should update eveything on your computer through terminal, remove everything related to wine and all wine everything clean up reinstall update and upgrade it if it can. Wines been on the decline for the last couple of years, nothing will break with that purge command I promise it just removes the wine filesystem all together and reinstalls it all dist-upgrade upgrades all those not upgraded things

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 04 '20 at 06:36

I eventually decided to just try sudo apt install wine-stable-amd64:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies.
 wine-stable-amd64 : Depends: libfaudio0 but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

A quick google lead me to the WineHQ Wiki which explains the libfaudio0 package that wine-stable-amd64 5.0.0 depends on isn't in the official repos for Ubuntu 18.04. It IS in openSUSE Build Service for 18.04, so adding that to sources allowed the upgrade to proceed.

How to see why apt has a specific package version installed?

2 Answers2