If you need to prevent a package from upgrading during ‘apt-get upgrade’, you need to put that package on hold:
$ sudo apt-mark hold package_name
When you run ‘apt-get upgrade’ with a package on hold, the output will look like this:
$ 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: virtualbox-6.0
To list the packages on hold:
$ sudo dpkg --get-selections | grep "hold"
Once a package is on hold, you must manually release it to upgrade it:
$ sudo apt-mark unhold package_name