I'm fairly new to Ubuntu, and I was getting the "packages held back" message on an apt-get upgrade. I came across several answers that mentioned using dist-upgrade instead, but some of them warned that this could be dangerous, or at least perform more of an upgrade than you might want.
I read the man page and found the "–with-new-pkgs" flag for apt-get upgrade, and in my case it did the trick: it installed some new packages, with a prompt informing me what packages would be installed and asking me if I wanted to continue.
It seems to me like this is may be a safer option than doing dist-upgrade — am I correct? Using dist-upgrade could remove packages, whereas when I ran upgrade –with-new-pkgs, it simply informed of a package that could be removed and told me to run 'apt-get autoremove' to remove it.
Best Answer
Yes, it is safer to some extent.
The core purpose of
upgrade --with-new-pkgsanddist-upgradeis to upgrade a package to the latest version and satisfy dependencies in the process.dist-upgradetakes the ambitious route of installing new packages and/or removing installed packages to satisfy dependencies. This could in turn remove some package(s) that is needed by another application, that's why it is not recommended always.On the other hand,
upgradewill just try to upgrade the package without installing/removing anything from the system.upgrade --with-new-pkgsadds the installing new package capability toupgradei.e. to satisfy dependency it can install new package(s) but will not remove anything.So we can put it in a simple expression (the initial
apt-getis omitted):Note that while upgrading kernel you will still need
dist-upgrade.Also
autoremoveremoves the packages that were installed as dependencies (marked asauto) and no longer needed.