bash upgraded but its version doesn't change

I'm working on Ubuntu 14.04 and I found something that I can't understand.

I execute the commands as below:

apt update && apt list --upgradable

I've found that bash is in the upgradable list.

For now the output of bash --version tells me that the version of bash is 4.3.11(1).

Then I do apt upgrade.

To my surprise, I do bash --version again and the output doesn't change at all. The version of bash is still 4.3.11(1).

So is this normal?, Some package can be upgradable while its version doesn't change?

Solution 1:

You should also check the package version:

$  bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.4.12(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
$ apt-cache policy bash | head -n3
bash:
  Installed: 4.4-5ubuntu1~16.04.york0
  Candidate: 4.4-5ubuntu1~16.04.york0

As can be seen, the package and bash version strings have differences, as they're set by different people. In your case it might well be the case that nothing changed upstream, and changes were entirely by the package maintainer, so bash --version remains unchanged, but the package version changed.