Allow for selective upgrades of packages

Discuss
1

I am currently faced with a dilemma:

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image1236Ă—650 26.8 KB

I want to upgrade all of that, except Crystal. If I upgrade Crystal then Invidious will stop working. But I have no way of selecting to skip that package. I can do that for Applications tho. So why not implement the same feature for packages in order for admins to better manage their system in such cases as mine?

Cheers!

2

Hi,

You should be able to achieve that in command line with apt. You better have to understand how the package system of Debian works to avoid breaking your server.

3

Hi,

Yes I know you can achieve that via the command line, but since the Applications upgrade allows for individual apps upgrade, maybe it would be a good idea to have that for packages too. I use Webmin to upgrade Debian packages and it allows for such a thing. Which is super useful.

4

Then you knew you have a way to skip a package upgrade. :stuck_out_tongue:

I don’t think it would be so useful for the vast majority of users. They shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of issue (dependency problem in this case). That’s a bit the idea behind the Ynh project.

If we consider your specific situation, the Invidious Ynh app manually installed the version 0.36.1 of the crystal .deb package. Thus I don’t get from which apt repo the system sees an update. Could you return the output of this command, please ?

apt policy crystal
1 Like
5

Meh it’s not that trivial I believe, because in the general case, some packages may depend on other packages, so you can’t just pick an arbitrary list of packages to upgrade while forbidding other packages to be upgraded

Anyway … for you specific issue, I guess a simple workaround should be to flag the package as held:

apt-mark hold crystal

then it won’t get upgraded (even though it’s displayed as upgradable)

3 Likes
6

The problem is I cannot see those updates from ynh in webmin…only other packages updates like debian ones.

    apt policy crystal
crystal:
  Installed: 0.36.1-1
  Candidate: 1.0.0-1+61.1
  Version table:
     1.0.0-1+61.1 500
        500 http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:languages:crystal/Debian_10  Packages
 *** 0.36.1-1 100
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Ok I’ll do that for now. How to un-hold it when needed?

1 Like
7 
apt-mark unhold crystal
1 Like
8

Makes sense :). Thanks!