Yeah @BlackEdder I’d already done the same by the time you replied. (I’m glad I ordered the torx screwdriver.)
After installing the image again, I slowly upgraded 92 of the 95 packages available. For the moment, based on what I’ve read here and elsewhere, I’ve left these three in their “factory image” state:
libudev1:armhf - libudev shared library
mycroft-core - mycroft-core
udev - /dev/ and hotplug management daemon
So far, the only apparent change is that when I boot the Mark 1, voices it’s lack of connection to WiFi and then connects. I don’t know if that’s because my WiFi hotspot is behaving badly, or if Mycroft is now less patient (or slower to connect), or if some package has made Mycroft better informed about the environment.
But other than that announcement, things seem to be working okay with all but 3 of the 95 package upgrades installed.
I wrote a wee Bash script (not my best work) to help me determine what was “safe” to upgrade.
#!/bin/bash
# Written by Ubuntourist 2017.07.22
# Provide brief description of packages to be upgraded
apt list --upgradable \ # Pretty obvious
| cut -d / -f 1 \ # eliminate everything except package name
| sed -e "s/.*/dpkg -l &/" \ # turn it into "dpkg -l <package name>"
| bash \ # Feed it as a command to Bash
| grep "^ii " \ # eliminate header. Get detail line only
| tr -s "[:blank:]" \ # collapse spacing
| cut -d " " -f 2,5- \ # Get only package name and description
| sed -e "s/ / - /" \ # Put a dash between them
| most # Use my favorite pager