I believe a cli-shot is clearer than trying to explain:

% sudo apt upgrade
[sudo] password for felipe:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  wine wine-bin:i386 wine32:i386 wine64
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
% sudo apt full-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  wine wine-bin:i386 wine32:i386 wine64
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 300 kB of archives.
After this operation, 132 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.


I will hold off upgrading this set of packages in case more information is required.

My guess is that it includes a "Policy breaks with upgrade of" message,
which is apt-speak for: A recommends relation isn't satisfied anymore
after this upgrade.

As recommends are supposed to be installed by default and more
importantly you could loose features by having a recommends no longer
satisfied upgrade isn't doing this upgrade as its supposed to do only
'safe' things.

dist-upgrade on the other hand has no problem with breaking recommends.


So, assuming I am right, the real question is why one of the wine
packages has a recommends which isn't satisfiable (currently?).



I presume dist-upgrade (at least in apt, the usual difficulties with
changing apt-get apply) should grow a "unsatisfied recommends" display.
I think aptitude has it too, but apt-get has this display for sure while
install(ing) packages. Its showing suggests in this view too, through,
that is probably a bit much given that they aren't installed by default
and dist-upgrade potentially touches thousands of packages so that could
end up being thousands of unsatisfied suggests – but the list of
unsatisfied recommends is ideally very small if not zero.

One complication through: Upgrading packages considers new vs. old
unsatisfied recommends and installs new recommends, while leaving the
old ones uninstalled, so such a list might want to consider that as
well.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

Hi,

Will try this as soon as I get home, I'm not on my workstation at the moment.

% apt upgrade -o Debug::pkgProblemResolver=1 -s
NOTE: This is only a simulation!
      apt-get needs root privileges for real execution.
      Keep also in mind that locking is deactivated,
      so don't depend on the relevance to the real current situation!
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Entering ResolveByKeep
  Dependencies are not satisfied for libasound2-plugins [ i386 ] <
none -> 1.0.28-1+b1 > ( libs )
Keeping package libasound2-plugins:i386
  Policy breaks with upgrade of wine32 [ i386 ] < 1.6.2-19 -> 1.6.2-20
Keeping package wine32:i386
  Policy breaks with upgrade of wine64 [ amd64 ] < 1.6.2-19 ->
1.6.2-20 > ( otherosfs )
Keeping package wine64:amd64
  Dependencies are not satisfied for wine [ amd64 ] < 1.6.2-19 ->
1.6.2-20 > ( otherosfs )
Keeping package wine:amd64
  Dependencies are not satisfied for wine-bin [ i386 ] < 1.6.2-19 ->
1.6.2-20 > ( otherosfs )
Keeping package wine-bin:i386
Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  wine wine-bin:i386 wine32:i386 wine64
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.

And indeed the changelog for wine32 is:

wine (1.6.2-20) unstable; urgency=medium

  * Recommend libasound2-plugins (closes: #779002).


A message of this sort would be awesome.