Geoff Kaniuk wrote:

Dear Release Notes,

Writing "to" the package like this gets you to the debian-doc mailing
list, which isn't meant as a user support venue. If you're happy
going through email you're recommended to ask questions like this on
the debian-user mailing list (https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/).
But since I'm not subscribed to that list I'll give you my own advice
here.

I have started my upgrade to Buster, and I would like to ask your advice on the very large number of packages 'held-back'. This was reported by apt-get upgrade:
752 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 697 not upgraded.

If you're doing this as stage 4.4.4 "Minimal system upgrade" of the
procedure recommended in the Release Notes, the whole point of that
exercise is to upgrade only a subset of the installed packages before
then carrying on and doing the rest with "apt full-upgrade" in 4.4.5+.

(Now that you've done an "apt update", any piecemeal attempt to do an
"apt upgrade foo" is likely to fail: it wants to install new Buster
library packages, and you haven't given explicit permission for that.)

I felt that this was a very large number and so aborted the upgrade. I have reported details in the Debian forum: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=147098

There have been a number of replies on this topic including:
'carry-on' , 'apt-get dist upgrade', 'fresh-install'.

A few of those people confidently giving advice on the forums seem
disturbingly clueless. *Not* needing reinstalls for every new stable
release has always been one of Debian's big selling-points.

My system is backed up every night and I act on package update messages from apticron daily, so I was not expecting a huge number of held-back packages.

Is the number I report expected?

If anything I'm a bit surprised the "not upgraded" list is so small,
though I don't remember what it was for my own stretch-to-buster
dist-upgrades. It might just be a sign of how much more closely
integrated a desktop running systemd+GNOME (or whatever) is these
days. But it isn't evidence of things going wrong.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package

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