On Tue, Jul 07, 2026 at 04:05:22PM -0400, Eben King wrote: > On 7/7/26 15:21, Robert Heller wrote: > > At Tue, 7 Jul 2026 14:18:25 -0400 Eben King <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > I have a need to find the upgradable package with the most dependencies. > > Why do you need to do this? And why does speed matter? > > Generally, I dislike it when lots of things change at the same time
Unless you are on testing or unstable surely almost all updates are security updates and you want them all pretty much as soon as possible? > I got to thinking it might be bad to update some parts of a package > and not others, so I want to upgrade those at the top of their tree of > dependencies. As packages are not divisible entities for upgrade purposes, I assume you mean the situation where package foo depends upon package bar and both of them are due an upgrade, you are saying that you would prefer to upgrade foo so as to not get a version of bar that is unexpected by the non-upgraded foo. The thing is, this is unnecessary and won't work as you would want anyway. If foo just lists a dependency on bar then any version of bar will be good enough for foo. So there should be no harm in upgrading bar and doing so won't force an upgrade of foo unless there is also a dependency the other way that lists a specific version requirement. Normally you'd just do "apt full-upgrade" or whatever and let everything be upgraded but in this instance there should be no harm in upgrading only bar with something like "apt install --only-upgrade bar". Apart from that there is a security update pending for foo that you've decided not to apply. I am not sure what would happen if you told apt to upgrade only foo, and the incoming foo package had a versioned dependency on an upgraded bar package but you had not allowed the upgrade of any other package. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
