[SOLVED] After upgrade to Jessie, db5.1-util is being held back

It gives this message after doing 'apt-get upgrade'

The following packages have been kept back:
db5.1-util

I tried this:
apt-mark unhold db5.1-util

but it says was already not hold.

Scratching my head here.. Idears?

If you upgrade to a newer version of Debian do not use apt-get upgrade to do the actual upgrade, use apt-get dist-upgrade instead, of course after reading the upgrade portion of the rease notes.

TobiSGD, thanks for the reply. That's actually what I did. Here's the steps I took:

After replacing all "wheezy" with "jessie" in sources.list file, I ran 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. After that I rebooted, then 'apt-get clean', then 'apt-get update', then apt-get upgrade just to check for any other packages. This is when I get that message about the db5.1-util being held.

Is it okay to just ignore this?

I wouldn't ignore that, db-util in Jessie is at version 5.3, so there is definitely something wrong. May it be possible that this package was manually placed on hold? What does

dpkg --get-selections | grep db-util

show?

the first command showed nothing:
root@erikpc:~# dpkg --get-selections | grep db-util

Then I tried to unhold package manually like this:
root@erikpc:~# apt-mark unhold db5.1-util
db5.1-util was already not hold.
root@erikpc:~#

I believe it's an empty package because I've been getting that message in all my machines, not just jessie but my sid box also.

This has been happening for about 6 mos. on different machines.

What is the output of:

apt-cache policy db-util

It said that it wasn't installed so I installed it & it wouldn't upgrade to 5.3 so I installed 5.3 & now have both should 5.1 be removed?

root@erikpc:~# apt-cache policy db-util
db-util:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 5.3.0
Version table:
5.3.0 0
500 http://ftp.utexas.edu/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages

Weird.

Try this:

# dpkg -r db-util_5.1.6_all.deb

You may have to modify the version number to match the one on your system.

after apt-get remove db-util, i did a apt-get install db-util and it installed db5.3-util. Now it's not giving that message anymore. Thanks all.

Just remove the package db-util

sam@lounge:~$ ac show db-util
Package: db-util
Source: db-defaults
Version: 5.3.0
Installed-Size: 38
Maintainer: Debian Berkeley DB Group <pkg-db-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Architecture: all
Depends: db5.3-util
Description-en: Berkeley Database Utilities
 This empty package depends on the recommended utilities package
 containing different tools for manipulating databases and installs
 unversioned links to current database utilities.
Description-md5: d85ea68b5af48dcbdc0e4173be4d602d
Tag: role::metapackage, works-with::db
Section: utils
Priority: extra
Filename: pool/main/d/db-defaults/db-util_5.3.0_all.deb
Size: 2696
MD5sum: c4fa12b2b5030bc24b77e9cbddeb9479
SHA1: 09d802aaae794d72a7390ae6f797961ee99ed0c4
SHA256: 6965ed47145f89da6312459b54df8d708619c30b5d3d42fe8bbd6aef6d176cc1

That is from a Sid install.

Find the current version of the actual package, in my case "db5.3-util", and install that.

If you have more than one version installed I would tend to favor removing older versions. However if dpkg doesn't see them as conflicting I am not sure that it is necessary. But you can only use one at time and unless they have very different functionality one is all you should be carrying on your system.

The command shown in the code box "ac show" is "apt-cache show". I am really good at typos so I use aliases to cut down on the chance of them.