how to upgrade a single package in debian

Question

I'm currently running debian 8 and I want to upgrade security patches which is provided by debian but problem is that, if I upgrade a single package then it asks to upgrade many packages, as in:

$ apt-get upgrade openssl

The following packages will be upgraded:
dpkg dpkg-dev krb5-locales libapache2-mod-php5 libdpkg-perl libfreetype6      libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common libgssapi-krb5-2
libk5crypto3 libkrb5-3 libkrb5support0 libpng12-0 libssl1.0.0 linux-headers-3.2.0-4-amd64 linux-headers-3.2.0-4-common
linux-image-3.2.0-4-amd64 linux-libc-dev ntp php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-   curl php5-readline tzdata unzip virtualbox virtualbox-dkms
virtualbox-qt....too many

The following packages have been kept back:
acpid anacron apt-xapian-index aptitude aptitude-common aspell-de at at- spi2-core avahi-daemon base-passwd bind9-host binfmt-support
bsdutils consolekit cron cryptsetup-bin db5.1-util dbus default-jre default- jre-headless dictionaries-common dmsetup dnsmasq-base
dnsutils dovecot-core dovecot-imapd dovecot-pop3d duplicity fakeroot gdebi- core gettext gir1.2-accountsservice-1.0 gir1.2-atspi-2.0
gir1.2-folks-0.6 gir1.2-gck-1 gir1 ....too many

How to skip the above packages?

Solution 1

You have to use:

sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install openssl

this will upgrade only openssl package and, eventually, the dependencies.

Solution 2

The problem you're having is that apt-get upgrade upgrades all packages installed on your system. The extra package name you're specifying is not used.

You should use apt-get install openssl if you only want to upgrade that one package. Some other packages may be upgraded at the same time if the new version of the specified package depends on newer versions of those other packages.

Comments

[Admin]

If you're running Debian 8 you should really upgrade all those other packages too; the stable distribution has very strict conditions for updates, so if a package upgrade is available there's generally a very good reason for it.

[Nullpointer]

I execute this command: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done openssl is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 32 not upgraded.

[Stephen Kitt]

If you want to upgrade the OpenSSL packages, you're looking for libssl1.0.0: sudo apt-get --only-upgrade install libssl1.0.0.

[Nullpointer]

problem is that, it's too many dependency of openssl like kernel, php, mysql, ever virtual box, many libs and it's effect to many existing applications. total download site is more then 400mb, please give my option.

[Nullpointer]

I check current version of OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013 after the upgrading above command.

[Dolda2000]

The problem with this is that it also marks the package as being manually installed. I know I can reset it with apt-mark, but I do wonder if there's a way to avoid that little extra trouble.