apt not upgrading package

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sun, 05 Jun 2016 11:32:06 +0100, Grizzly wrote:
>To a new eye it looks like that Dist-Upgrade & Upgrade (should) do
>slightly different things

Yes, it#s explained by the man page.

>Dist-Upgrade does as it says to the  distribution, i.e.
>the stuff that came with your flavour of Ubuntu (or was added to later
>Dists)
>
>Upgrade does anythiong that was added/installed by user via apt-get
>(or the GUI eqiv)
>
>I might be wrong ?

Yesno, it's vice versa, if your target is stability.
Usually "apt-get upgrade" shouldn't cause issues within an Ubuntu
release, when using official repositories. If you add third party
repositories or you replace the official repositories of your current
install, with the official repositories for the next release (release
upgrade shouldn't be done this way, but could be done this way), then a
smarter, less risky way to upgrade is required, this is "apt-get
dist-upgrade". IOW usually it's vice versa, upgrading a default Ubuntu
flavour without third party repositories and by not upgrading to the
next Ubuntu release, could be done using "apt-get upgrade", since
nothing should cause conflicts, that could break something. If you want
to be careful, then you could run "dist-upgrade" first and after that
check if something would change, if you run "upgrade", usually this is
required if you e.g. use third party repositories. OTOH indeed,
usually you can run "dist-upgrade", without to risk that something is
missing, if you use official repositories only.
What Colin experienced not necessarily is a bug. IMO, since just a
package is missing, even "dist-upgrade" should warn about an available
upgrade, with a missing dependency, but it could be expected that the
"smart" "decisions" could cause issues like, resp. similar to this one.