I’m on Debian 12. I did an upgrade today and got a message that pipewire-audio had been kept back. A few weeks ago I did a:
sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports pipewire
Which pulled in the newer version of pipewire so I could resolve an issue.
So I searched for ‘apt kept back’ and found the above article. I wanted to share it for anyone else in the future hitting something like this.
My solution is just to do nothing. Debian 13 should only be a few months away at this point and when I attempt to run an update only for pipewire-audio it indicates that I need to update wireplumber. I don’t really want to go down the dependency hole at this time, so just going to let it chill.
A package is “kept back” when it faces requirements that can’t be resolved while adhering to the given options.
For example, this can happen when a dependency at a certain version is required, but that version is available only from a source (e.g. backports) whose priority is too low to be used by default*. You can resolve this particular situation by naming not only the main package, but also the dependency in question, on your
apt install -t bookworm-backportscommand line. (The-t bookworm-backportsoption overrides the default source priorities.)Looking at the dependencies of pipewire-audio in backports, I see that one of them (wireplumber) has a version requirement that can be satisfied from backports, so this might work for you:
BTW, I’m sure that pipewire from backports works on Bookworm, because I use it myself. You don’t have to wait for Trixie.
*You can get details about how the priority system works via
man apt_preferences.That’s awesome! Thank you so much for the thorough explanation. :-)