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I can’t seem to figure this one out. I do ‘sudo apt update’ and it reports 1 update available:

sudo apt list --upgradable -a
Listing... Done
dmidecode/jammy-updates 3.3-3ubuntu0.1 arm64 [upgradable from: 3.3-3]
dmidecode/jammy,now 3.3-3 arm64 [installed,upgradable to: 3.3-3ubuntu0.1]

I then to ‘sudo apt upgrade’ and I get this:

sudo apt upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
 dmidecode
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

Does anyone have an idea why the upgrades won’t install? How can I update this package?

Qmails
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1 Answers1

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Does anyone have an idea why the upgrades won’t install?

Yes - TLDR: a thing called phased updates.

Here's a slightly longer answer. Imagine there's a bug in the new version of the package. If the new version is released to everyone all at once, the maintainers will get overwhelmed with bug reports by all these users & also there will be lots of people affected, and some may not update their buggy package again for some time - which is bad. So what maintainers can do instead is configure an update as a phased update. This means a small handful of users get it first and they act as the "phase 1 testers" so to speak, clearing the way for the next round of people- "phase 2 testers", which is a slightly larger set and so on. This way, the hope is that more bugs will be found during earlier phases, and then there's less impact on both maintainers and users in the report-fix-redpeploy-update cycle that follows a bug. Or, as stated on the Ubuntu Wiki, phased updates are done:

so that serious regressions can be detected before updates are pushed to everyone, and the process stopped. The aim is for regressions to affect a smaller proportion of our userbase.

How can I update this package?

TLDR: Don't. Just leave it. When it's ready, it'll update when you run the apt upgrade command or as part of an automatic update.

If there is a real reason you need the latest version of the pacakge, then there does seem to be a way to bypass phased updates, but I would only do this if you absolutely need the new version:

The “Updates” panel of the Contributor Console should let testers opt out of phased updates post-release, or opt in to phased updates pre-release (to test the phasing mechanism itself).

- Ubuntu Wiki.

Colm Bhandal
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