Definitive guide to: The following packages have been kept back

In virtually every installation of Debian -or derivative- it will happen that at some point during software management one will be prompted this message: The following packages have been kept back Let’s provide an example to make it clear.

Example

First, you ran:

apt-get update

and everything was fine. We can affirm the command reported a 0 exit code.

After this you ran:

sudo apt-get upgrade

if your OS‘ software gets updated often and if it is updated at the time of running the upgrade command the output will be like this:

iamsysadmin@examplehost:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  cinnamon-screensaver
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

… and there is the weird message: The following packages have been kept back.

Read more